I’m just about ready for this book to be done. I can tell because I’m outputting around 2000 words at a time now instead of the requisite minimum of 1000 words. Maybe this is making up for June, who knows? Here’s the stats.
Total Words Written in July: 17435.
Total Writing Days: 10
Average Words Per Day: 1,744
Total Words Written by the End of June: 64,511
And I would have written more if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids! Haha, no seriously, the last day I wrote in July was the 23rd. The last week of July I was faced with having to decide whether I was going back to Kansas to take a new position at my company or stay here in Washington.
I ultimately chose to stay in Washington, but not until I had agonized over the decision for a week. Which would be the week in which I did not write. Any sane person with the longing I have for Kansas would have gone back. But for some reason the people at the church I chose decided to grow on me, and I felt like I must stay here. For a few reasons, but mostly for them. Perhaps as recently as three months ago I would not have made the same decision.
Despite having only written for a third of the days of July, and for two days less than I wrote in June, I managed to output 4,000 more words than I had written in June. I think I’m over the mushy middle. I’ll be outputting at least 2,000 more words tonight once I finish with this blog post. And I fully expect to have the book done by the end of August, although I’m shooting for the third week. Wish me luck!
Life in General: I’m feeling quite at peace with my decision to stay here, which is in itself quite a different position from where I was a month ago, when I wrote in this space that I was missing home.
Short Story: Synopsis still awaiting approval from the client.
Work: Doing my best to earn that raise in November!
Exercise: Cancelled my YMCA membership, but too late before it was drafted from my bank account for August. This makes me frustrated, especially since I seem to belong to the YMCA where the membership director is never available, which makes it hard to talk to her about a refund.
SW City and Active Worlds: Teh forum drama llamaz, it hurts! Entertaining, but also getting old on its third month in.
Voice Acting: Hey! I’m now the official VO guy for the EU Review! Check them out here!
June was a unique experience in that I was writing the middle of the book and coming back from a great vacation at the beginning of the month. I managed to write about 4,000 words or so on my vacation, and when I came back I didn’t want to work. So I took the week off.
This feeling of malaise has followed me right up until last week when I finally got the part of the book I’ve been wanting to write. So I suppose you can chalk up the month’s lower wordcount to the vacation combined with writing a part of the book that isn’t my favorite part to write; somewhere between the 50% and 66% mark. Blagh. Let’s take a look at the stats, shall we?
Total Words Written in June: 13,423.
Total Days Having Written: 12
Average Words Per Day: 1,119
Total Words Written by the End of June: 47,076
Ew. Now I don’t usually measure by how many days I’ve written in a month. I much prefer measuring by total output. If that means writing 5,000 words a day for three days then so be it. I might actually prefer it that way, to be honest, as it seems to my mind a more productive way of doing things. But a working professional writer writes almost every day and I need to build up that discipline first in order to plan for eventually writing full-time. So I’m a little surprised and disappointed to realize that I only wrote less than half of the days of the month. I can only do better this month.
The total words for June is 3,141 under the total for May and 3,666 under the total for April. Had I written just three more days I would have matched that level of output.
On the positive side, I’m still around 10,000 words above my minimum goal for June. I’m writing this during a break at work so I don’t have the exact number handy. I seem to have had this problem last month as well. So let’s just say we’re well within the ballpark.
I think it’s possible that I don’t like writing the middles of books. The resultant drop in my motivation to write and the fact that this is the least interesting part of the book for me, combined with me wondering if I will ever finish this make this a likely possibility. But I’ll have to write a few more books to be sure. 
July, however, is shaping up well as I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As of July 12th, I’ve written a total of 53,635 words. I want to crack 65,000 by the end of the month, but we will see. This means my book has expanded beyond the initial 60,000 word goal. I’m pretty sure I will go beyond that, but am unsure if I will hit 80,000 words. I would like to, because it would be nice to know that I can plot and write a mass market-sized novel. But we will have to see if there’s enough story there. I won’t be artificially trying to expand it.
Hopefully you can expect July’s update within the first week of August.
The Rundown
Life in General: I’m missing home already. I’m also addicted to Pokemon, which I’m playing on my new 3DS that I splurged for. Went to the fireworks at Fort Vancouver and traded StreetPass data with two other people. This is a neat idea, but I don’t live in a crowded enough country for it to really catch on. Ideally one should be able to trade StreetPass data with players over the Internet.
Short Story: Synopsis still awaiting approval from the client.
Work: Doing my best to earn that raise in November!
Exercise: Didn’t exercise at all after my vacation at the beginning of June. Curiously I did not gain any weight. Perhaps I’ve modified my eating habits enough. Yet, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, I actually kind of miss the running. Since I don’t use the YMCA’s pool or weight machines for the most part, this is probably a good time to leave the Y and get a cheaper membership at another place elsewhere. Or buy a treadmill. Whichever.
SW City and Active Worlds: Active Worlds Inc. has had some staff turnover recently and the resulting soap opera on the forums has been fun to watch, though I sympathize with my friend who works there still. She gets to deal with all the unreasonable and irate teenagers on the phone and in the forums now. SW City hasn’t done much. Toying with planning a reunion-type event, but Ima Genius is doing a cruise in a few months, so that may mean it won’t make sense for us to do our own thing nine months later. This means my ConCarolinas friends will probably get to see me next year. Either way I win!
Voice Acting: Finished my first arc of episodes for the Bubblegum Crisis audio drama. I need to finish up a Podcast intro for a friend this week before I write any more.
I suppose I’m overdue for an update. This is the beginning of June and so far I’ve written about 36,000 words of a 60,000-80,000 word novel. This is well on target for the timeline I published back in March.
I went on vacation last week on the 28th and am sitting in the Charlotte airport awaiting my delayed flight back to Portland. During that time I wrote 4,951 words. This is an acceptable number, it keeps me on track, although I was going for 1,000 words a day, which would have boosted me beyond just an on schedule finish date to an early one. Oh well. At least I tried. Several storms in Kansas (I got my storms! Yay! I love storms.) and of course some unforseen things that took away from my planned writing time diminished the wordcount a bit. I may have also been a bit overzealous.
I’m actually surprised that I had the energy to write. It’s a lot easier to have some when I don’t have a day job to go to. Often I’m drained after work and it feels like a slog to start writing, although that feeling usually disappears about 15-30 minutes into a writing session.
Here’s the breakdown. For April I wrote 16,564 words. I started a week late because of some plotting issues, including last-minute negotiations to try to nail down whether I could use the SW City universe or not (turned out I couldn’t, and despite that, I’m happy with the world I’ve been able to create and think it is still able to accomplish most of the feeling I wanted to create by using the SW City universe). Because of this, I had to make a last-minute push at the end of the month that pushed me over the monthly minimum goal I had set for March by several thousand words. Since I’m in an airport I can’t refer to what that goal was, but it was somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 words, I believe.
May turned out pretty well, all things considered. 17,089 words written. Things went fairly according to schedule. That just leaves 2,460 words that I wrote on June 1 and 2. Ultimately I’m satisfied with my progress but am wishing I could go a bit faster. It’s hard to do that though. I also think for the next novel my weekly goal is going to be 3,000 words. As packed as my schedule is I’m finding I did not schedule in quite enough time for unforseen circumstances and well, just rest days, really.
This vacation has really been a blessing, as I’ve been able to recuperate and just relax. The writing has been really enjoyable for the most part, except for having to rewrite a scene because of a plot-hole I inadvertently introduced.
First I got to meet up with my brother Matthew and his wife and tour their new home. I then spent a couple days for Memorial Day at my grandmother’s lake house with relatives. I find I’m very lucky to have an extended family that doesn’t fight very often, and it was a real treat to see everyone again.
Last Monday we went home and I spent several days there. I even got to see a lightning storm, which Vancouver/Portland doesn’t get, and I’ve really missed the Kansas weather. I got to spend time with my parents, my brother Andrew, and got to see my two aunts on my dad’s side, whom I don’t get to see very often. We met at the Brookville restaurant in Abilene, spent some time in their freezer due to a tornado warning, and spent the rest of the evening (aforementioned writing time) dodging huge supercells full of death-inducing straightline winds and large hail while trying to drive home.
We even got to tour my friend Chuck’s house (he’s more Andrew’s friend than mine, but still a friend), which he purchased. It’s an old-style victorian home with monstrous square footage that he’s planning to rent out. A bit of a white elephant, really, but if he sticks with it he’ll actually make money. I can see why he bought it now.
The next day we found out my parents’ grain elevator business suffered some damage. I can’t upload photos now, but it damaged three grain bins of quarter-inch plate steel, crunching them like pop cans, and completely blew another bin made of thinner material off its foundation. This diminishes the capacity the elevator is able to take in for the wheat harvest in a few weeks, the largest money-making opportunity of the year. The river valley also flooded, which will further diminish the harvest yield for everyone who had wheat growing there. By no means a national disaster, but still a bad setback.
ConCarolinas was this weekend, and i got to see my friends Nathan, Andrew, Sarah, Joe, and meet a new friend, Josh. This year we actually spent more time enjoying each other’s company than going to panels and listening to other people speak. This is as it should be, IMHO. We even got to include Indiana Jim in on one of our conversations via the magic of Skype. He enjoyed it, and I think he was appreciative, since he wasn’t able to come this year due to family obligations.
Overall I think everyone really enjoyed the different feel of our get-together over previous years, this togetherness being the key element here. Some were even open to the idea of showing up on Thursday next year so that we can have an extra day to be together. In fact one person even suggested, independent of my input, that we ought to just get together at Nathan’s house someday instead of going to the con. I doubt that will ever happen, but I would welcome such a change. We could still geek out, but we could do it on our own schedule instead.
It’s not that I find cons boring. I just find my friends so much more interesting. They are why I traveled across an entire continent. Not the Sci-Fi Whose Line Is It Anyway? panel, although that was a blast too. Even got to shake hands with Harry Turtledove before that panel started.
Anyway, there is a storm incoming it looks like and I need to eat before the plane takes off since this plane is delayed and their cutting my layover in Houston short. So I will leave it here. Post questions in the comments section if you want to hear me reflect on something.
Until next time!
I’m a little depressed. The two Kansas-style thunderstorms we had tonight perked me up a bit, though. But I’m still a little down. That’s because I was not able to get permission from one of my friends who helped create the SW City universe to use that universe in my novel. You see, a bunch of my friends and I created it collaboratively over the last decade, and so to use it commercially in anything requires I get a license from each one of them by having them sign a contract granting that license. Everyone but one friend agreed to do so. And I needed everyone to agree.
It came down to two reasons. The first is that he doesn’t feel comfortable with signing any contracts whatsoever. The second is the primary motivation, that he considered it a very personal collaboration between us all and he thought any adaptation of the universe would require similar collaboration or it would spoil in his mind what he considered to be the “SW City”-ness of the result.
Obviously collaboration between seven or eight people is not something reasonably accomplished in writing novels.
I’m… well I still don’t know what to say, except that, Tee Morris, if you’re reading this, man, I so totally can relate to you right now. Luckily my friend is still talking to me and has given me a solid answer, but I can relate to being unable to write in a world you love so dearly because of the misgivings of a co-creator. So yeah, to say I’m disappointed is at best an understatement.
But the promise I made to my friends when I chose to explore this option was to preserve the friendships we have over everything else. If we couldn’t come up with a way to make it work, I wouldn’t pursue it. This outcome was always a possibility, and I tried to prepare for it, but its hard to prepare for something you don’t want to happen. It really is.
So in the aftermath I tried to find common ground with him in the midst of our difference, to let him know that I felt similarly when some of my cast and crew tried to take over my Star Wars fan film when I was in college, and that I don’t want him to be the bad guy in this. I even have defended him to my other friends who were excited at the possibility of reading a book set in the universe that they helped create and are now disappointed as well. All this bending over backwards has a point; to preserve a valuable friendship, despite our creative differences. These efforts have been largely successful as we are still on good terms.
Differences come with the territory of any friendship. And while I wish this wasn’t one of them, the goal is to learn and live with them. And so I’m moving on from it. I’m worldbuilding a new world with the same plot I devised; a different city set in a high fantasy environment, with different landmarks and different characters, but definitely still inspired by SW City.
It’s just it won’t feel quite the same for a little while. I wanted to capture the wonder of the SW City environment in the book that I felt while building the city with my friends. I can still do that to a lesser degree, I can try to capture the feeling and spirit, but the special significance of what has been a major part of my creative life in high school and college can not now be immortalized in the pages of a novel that I created; that field in which I’ve chosen to make my career.
That’s big for me. Melding my creative work then to the creative work I engage in now matters to me, just as much if not more than what protecting the collaborative nature of SW City means to my friend. It matters because that’s how I create; by taking elements of my past that are nostalgic to me or part of my identity and using them or even remixing them in new ways. It’s my time machine; my instantaneous teleport back to how things were, and simultaneously a way that I can share what I felt–that qualia or personal conscious experience of the feelings that I had on that day and at that time–with others in a compelling way.
That matters.
This solution of creating a similar but different world feels second-best right now, not quite good enough, and yet it’s really the only way I can justifiably stay interested in this project and stay on target with my goal of writing an ebook by Christmas. And perchance to dream, to fall in love with it again. Because when (not if) I do, readers will never know the difference. The only thing I will have lost is a link to my past.
And for some things, because you never know unless you ask, it’s worth taking the risk of the disappointment you might feel to see that link come to fruition. And if it doesn’t pan out, it becomes a loss worth having pursued as well as a loss worth mourning.
The Rundown
Life in General: Decided to do the church podcast. I’ll probably get to last Sunday’s sermon this weekend. Parents came into town and it was a lovely vacation. Just briefly, we did the old scenic highway to Multnomah Falls, a loop out to the coast and back to Vancouver, Helvatia Tavern, and Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. Taxes also filed, and getting a nice chunk back (but at a terrible investment rate, basically 0%)
YA Novel: As indicated previously, this is no longer an SW City novel. Wordcount is proceeding poorly, with only 1600 words capped. Outlining ran two days over my estimates and parents came into town last weekend, and now I’m having to worldbuild a new setting. My estimates placed me at around 10,000 words ideal by this date, but I’ve built in vacation and busy days to the estimated completion date and will be working this weekend to make up the difference, so I’m not too concerned at this point as it doesn’t really count as falling behind quite yet. Productivity-wise this has just been a lousy half month.
Short Story: Synopsis is awaiting approval by the client.
Writing: Considering going to Wesley Dean Smith’s How to Be A Publisher workshop in October. Luckily its local-ish and I have the vacation days available. Anybody want to come with?
Work: Lots of support e-mails. So much that I’m having trouble finding enough time to get into a groove working on user documentation when I’m not answering them.
Exercise: Ran 20 minutes straight for the first time in my life last week while on a treadmill. Haven’t exercised since. Hoping to make it up this Friday.
SW City: Enthusiasm understandably lacking at this point.
Voice Acting: Just accepted a dual-personality role in a new Bubblegum Crisis audio drama. I’m going to attempt to do an old man’s voice with a Boston accent. Two filters on my regular voice (the Boston accent being something I’m learning right now!) = challenging!
Oh yes, you read right. I’m going to kick this thing off. I’ve been seeing the amazing metamorphosis that self-publishing has been going through and I want a piece of the action. Therefore, I’m going to challenge myself to outline, write, revise, and publish a novel, all by Christmas 2011. Quite doable if I’m a professional. But I’m not yet. I will be, and the overarching goal is to become one. What better way to become one than to act like one?
This is going to be quite an amazing journey the goals I want to accomplish are these:
- Write a 60,000-80,000 word young adult novel set in the SW City universe (I co-own this property with friends). I’m shooting for 80,000 words but tend to write terse.
- Get into the habit and mindset of a professional freelance fiction writer.
- Publish a salable ebook by Christmas in order to take advantage of the post-Christmas ebook rush.
- Learn to use Scrivener for Windows.
- Learn about self-publishing ebooks. (Typesetting, layout, cover design, etc.)
To that end, I have set for myself several milestones. They are:
March 31: Finish Outline
April 1: Begin Writing
September 31: Finish Writing. Non-negotiable deadline.
October: Beta Readers read novel and submit feedback. Revisions.
November 15: Finish Revisions
November 15-December 20: Assemble ebook and publish.
To help me reach these milestones, I’ve concluded that I must write at least 437 words per day without having to make up work. I will shoot for 1000 a day in addition to my dayjob. Worst-case I anticipate writing only 4 days a week. This means I need to average about 4000 words a week in order to feel like I’m staying ahead of schedule.
If I write 1000 words a day every day from April 1 until I finish the novel, I will finish on June 20. This is what I’m calling my Perfect Date, and while it’d be nice to hit, I am guessing I will finish around August 19. I would like to finish in July, but we will see.
As you can see, I have built into my schedule plenty of extra writing days in case my life becomes inexplicably complicated. I would like to use these days for revisions, but am putting the focus on the first draft and pushing myself to finish the first draft earlier than my deadline so that I can use those days for revisions and learning about ebook publishing.
As a side note, because I’m writing in a shared universe that’s created by me and my friends, I don’t want anything to get in the way of our friendship. And they’ve communicated that neither do they. Going into business with friends often causes those friendships to end. So during the next few months I’ll also be researching and working out a legal agreement for each of us to sign. We want it to allow each of us to be able to freely use the concepts and ideas in our universe to develop and own our own commercial properties based off of it, without having to pay the others a licensing fee or royalty. That way we won’t be going into business with each other. Our joint concern is that one of our commercial properties based on this universe might somehow blow up into a success in such a way that would get in the way of our friendships. This isn’t something we expect to happen, but we want to cover our bases.
Any advice on my challenge to myself? Words of encouragement? :) Thanks for reading! I will report back progress updates when I am able.
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