Life, Writing, Weirdness

The overall word count for February was substantially lower than January. Near the end of January, I switched the way I was approaching things to work on one major fiction project at a time and rotate through drafts (see this post). And as part of the longer-term adjustment process, I’ve mostly been working on the final drafts of the Troll World quintet since the 22^nd of January. Still, once you add in the blog posts and work on the memory project plus a few other things here and there, it comes up to a respectable total of 27,917 words for the month.

Plotting, I’ve continued slow work on the first Valkyr Station novel. Not a ton of progress, really. Okay, very little. I think I fleshed out the details on one main character for a total of 404 added words. This isn’t a huge priority. Honestly, I don’t need to outline anything else for several years at least, but it is something I want to make a little progress on. I’ve picked the snowflake method to work things out, though I’ve almost never done that successfully all the way through, often skipping a couple of steps or skimping on the scene level outline. We’ll see how it goes.

Drafting. Not much of this. I drafted exactly one flash piece in February, “A Taste of Freedom” (Fantasy, 547 words).

Most of the work was done on the editing side of things. On the editing side,

• “Shakespeare’s Sisters” came out at 20,801 words. This was technically a second draft, but the original 11k novelette only told a bit more than half the story I thought it should. It’s better now, but might be a bit before I get to the editing stage.
• I’ve started work on the 2^nd draft of “Beyond Antares” a 9k-word SF novelette. Since my focus is on novel editing at the moment, I’m only hitting this on weekends, and the last several have been tough to find time beyond the primary project.
• But speaking of novels, I’ve made tremendous progress on the final drafts of the Troll World quintet:
  • Forest completed its final draft on the 5^th of February, coming in at 56,203 words. It’s the shortest book in the set, but tells a complete tale on its own.
  • I finished the final draft of Palace only 11 days later, now at 95,537 words. Unusual for me, it added almost 5% in length in the final draft (the historical average is about 1.7%), and Battlefield, which I’m working on now with only three or four days to go, looks like it’s going to do the same. I kept, and keep, finding little bits to tweak and add based on things that have happened in previous books. I think Palace is going to keep its place as the longest in the set, but it won’t be by very much.

On the poetry front, I’m haven’t done February’s transcriptions yet. Flipping through the notebook, there are three non-haiku poems, and due to a couple of major life events, the haiku-per-day habit has been harder to maintain. There are a few missed days. They’ll all get into the keyboard eventually.

There was one song, though. At least, the lyrics for one song. I suppose it could be read as a poem, but in my head it’s more protest prog rock. Five verses and no chorus about the travesty of satellite constellations.

Word count breaks down as follows:

• A mere 1985 words of new fiction,
• 10,337 words of net change while editing things.
• A massive total of 404 words of plotting on Valkyr Station Book 1,
• 15,191 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project and blog posts.

Not a bad haul overall.

Be well, everyone.