Do You Even Blog, Bro?

Oh, hi!

It's been one of my blogless seasons. I have a new job, and I have a deadline. So I've basically shoved my head directly into the mincer. But with the news that Ann Hathaway will be starring in a Kaiju film, My Year of Monsters will be around for some time.

It's been difficult to remember what blogging was like before the two years of going through a monster film every Thursday. What the hell else did I talk about? The new job is in a bookstore, and has much less fodder for funny stories, (thank Cthulhu).

My video gaming is down quite a bit, owing to the deadline. I'm back on Rise of Flight, and readers can go here for an accurate summation of what that's like. I really should post some pictures, because posts with pictures always have a better read rate than posts without them. So here's your bandwidth-consuming picture of what I'm doing when I'm not writing.

How Not to Write

Mood: Manic

There are a number of writers who can come up with a couple of characters and bang them together and make a story. Just start on their story with no clue as to how it's going to end, where the story is going to take them, just strike out for unknown territory with one or two people for company.

I am not one of them. This is the first time I have started a story without a clear ending in mind. It was, in process, a disaster. As it stands, the story is some six thousand words. The file is about nine thousand words, which includes two starts to the story that didn't pan out, several wads of research and ideas that make up the background for the story, but did not actually make it into the story itself. That's about three days' worth of work that are not in the story.

This is not a comfortable way for me to write a story, and I'm not sure it's producing good work. Because I obsessed over the story, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. I'm behind on my blog (I've got a month's worth of blog ideas), I'm way behind on my personal correspondence, because I've been afraid to devote energy to something else. And when I get that intensely focussed, I don't turn out my best work because I stop new ideas to the story.

But I got the first draft done last night. First revision today, and it goes to the Roundtable tonight. Then, I think, it'll sit for a few days while I start a new story. One that I'm not going to obsess about so much.

Error #3: Not Having Goals and Deadlines

We had a loud, extended thunderstorm on Wednesday the 15^th, which reminded me that I hadn't backed up anything since... February. So I worried through the storm, and the next day I went out and picked up a hundred CDs, and backed up all the important stuff. I was a little curious as to how I had progressed since my last backup, so I stuck my last update CD (February 2) into the computer, and looked at how many words I had written in the last three and a half months.

8,000. I'd gotten 8,000 words done on my novel since February.

8,000 is nothing. Three and a half months averaging 2,000 words a month. A saleable novel is somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 words. My plan is to have this book finished by November so I can go to the World Fantasy Con (less than two hours from where I live) this year and pitch it. I'll need to have the first draft done by October 1 at the latest so I can have a month to revise it before I go to WFC.

I have four months to get between 35,000 and 40,000 words written. At 2,000 words a month, that just wasn't going to happen. I mean, I had my plan, but I hadn't been keeping an eye on my progress toward that goal.

So for the last three weeks, the goal has been a thousand words done every day that I devote to writing (which is to say three days a week). It hasn't been easy--I've really had to sweat. And I haven't always made trhe daily goal. But more often than not I have, and the progress is wonderful. Since I put myself on the daily goals, the book has grown from 36,000 words to 41,500: five and a half thousand words in two weeks. At this pace, I will finish by the end of September and still have time to revise it.

Lesson learned. I can't just set a deadline for a novel the way I can with shorter works. I have to make sure have set shorter-term goals to make sure I'm getting everything done in proper time.