Life, Writing, Weirdness

So April was a tough month for Academics, but we’re in the clear now. Project, presentation, exam, and research proposal are all in the rearview and I’ve spent a few days destressing and taking care of the last of my TA duties for the term (marking an exam).

Writing time has been lighter this month and while I didn’t miss a day, I did pretty seriously neglect the novel I’m drafting. Which is okay. I did get about 12k words in on it and the total is over 50k now, but a couple of bits of it have expanded and I’m currently projecting 95-100k, which feels long for a superhero novel, although not out of the ballpark.

The total wordcount for April came in at 31,835 which considering just how much of my time went towards doing well (although just shy of how well I was hoping for) in a very difficult term is pretty good. And I didn’t miss a day. The word count for some of those does was small, but there wasn’t a day with no writing. And no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a day off now and then, but I don’t take too many of those when it comes to writing. Or I don’t want to, most of the time. So, to give some quick details:

• Fiction drafting came out to a little more than 12k words on the first draft of Heroic Genesis. I’d wanted this to be closer to 25k, but that was self-imposed. As long as the story doesn’t grow too much in the telling, I still expect to be finished this sometime in May. If it does grow a lot, then sometime in June.
• After ignoring it for most of the month, I finally started on the single-sentence scene level description of the outline process for the first Valkyr Station novel but again.
• Only 7 blog posts, hitting my basic goal of 1.5 per week, but I hope for May to be better.
• The Memory Project got a little bit of time every day this month.
• 12 non-haiku poems that haven’t been transcribed yet.

Word count summary:

• A total of 12,059 words of new fiction,
• 1,058 words of net change during edits,
• 588 words of plotting on Valkyr Station Book 1,
• 18,130 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project, blog posts, and lyrics for one song (which makes 2 so far this year).

I’m satisfied with how the month worked out. I try not to look too deep in to the future because one never knows what twists and turns are coming one’s way, but if the average of the four months of the year so far can be the average for all the months of the rest of the year, I’ll solidly break 400k and the last time I managed an annual total that high was 2019. Even the main COVID year was only 318k, but there was a lot of editing that year and the first quarter was mostly a write off. (For reference, my best year ever for raw word count remains 2014 at 697,123 with 2/3 of that being fiction.)

Be well, everyone.