Life, Writing, Weirdness

This will be a little longer than the usual writing report as I’m going to cover three months all at once. You’ll note I haven’t been blogging a lot lately, and while previous posts might lead one to believe it’s because I’m hard at work on my thesis, the truth of the matter is that the thesis is suffering somewhat while I take care of some major family issues and my defense may get pushed back a bit. Writing does continue, although less of it in front of the computer and more of it dictated into my phone and automatically transcribed. I’m trying to make a tiny bit of progress each day on the current novel plus the slow second draft of a novella, but it is tiny and I miss days regularly.

Still, overall I have to regard things as successful at least on a raw wordcount basis. The Q3 total comes out to 177,829 words (41,733, 22,007, and 114,089 for each month respectively). A lot of that last month is essentially due to spending a lot of time by myself in a car going to and from another city and another town. The big increase is mostly reflected in the non-fiction total, which I find easier to dictate when I’m under significant stress. That big total for September puts the month at #9 in my top ten monthly raw word counts ever.

From here, we’ll do the usual breakdown for plotting, drafting, and editing for fiction and non-fiction progress:

• I’ve finished the scene plotting section for the second Valkyr Station novel and have made a start on the outline of the third. I’m still in the overall plot expansion phase of that and need to decide if I need any new substantial characters or not. Even though I probably won’t start drafting this series until sometime in 2029 (or later), I want to slowly plot them all. I’ve planned between five and seven books in the series. Between because the simplified plot for the first five books ends on an open point where the overarching story issue has been effectively (maybe) dealt with but the external threat still exists elsewhere and some factions in the expanded Alliance are arguing for dealing with it on a larger, more permanent basis.
• First Draft Fiction: 21.3k words on Heroic Genesis, which is not a great total for three months working on a novel but isn’t zero, plus another 2.3k into short fiction, about half of it on a short currently titled “A Thousand Deaths” and the rest on two flash fiction pieces.
• A total of 13 blog posts up, although I’ve written one future post for October: this one. I just need to fill in the final numbers and decide if I want to tweak anything.
• The Memory Project: 102.0k words, which is insane but again I have an easier time dictating non-fiction when I’m under stress, and there was a lot of stress in September when a large majority of these words came into being. This was finishing the drafting of Volume 4, making massive progress on Volume 5 (which I’m currently projecting as ~41% done where I started September at about 6.5%, and that will probably be something on the high side of 150,000 words), a lot of commentary on Volume 5B (the journals and blogs that match up with the Volume 5 timeline) taking me fairly close to the first draft of this one being complete, plus a little catching up on the current time period volume, and a few little bits added to several of the volumes that aren’t directly about me.
• 6 non-haiku poems that haven’t been transcribed yet. Haven’t been writing a lot of poetry lately, but I have a significant song lyric project planned.
• 18 journal entries that weren’t handwritten, all but three of them in September, and no handwritten entries.

Word count summary:

• A total of 23,558 words of new fiction,
• 6,512 words of net change during edits. A lot of this has been from pulling out novellas written long ago and seeing if they’re salvageable. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing pretty well on that score.
• 6,300 words of plotting on Valkyr Station Books 2 and 3.
• 141,459 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project, blog posts, poetry transcriptions, and so on.

Overall, from a raw word count, the quarter looks really good, with an average month on the order of 59,250 words, although that average is only so high because of the large number of dictation hours in September. Still, we take our joy and word counts where we can find them. September was light on one of those.

Dictation persistence in September had me hit 5(?!) 10,000-word days, the first three were in a row, and the first of those shattered the best-day record of 8,138 days I’d set in June 2020, in the early days of the COVID shutdown. The second one squeaked that a little higher, and the third pushed the upper limit by another 1300 words by virtual of sitting in ridiculous traffic for a really long time. Then I did that again. After the month was over, the new one-day record sat at 12,628 words, and I expect it will probably be there for a while. But it wasn’t just those days carrying me through. I also had 5 other days that broke 5k words, some of them by a lot, and that’s more of those than I usually have in a year. The earlier part of the month was much lighter, and I had 2 days with zeroes and another where I barely opened the laptop as I pulled myself together, but even so the average writing day broke 4000 words.

All in all, Q3 (and especially September, which is now my highest total for a single month on record) have pushed this year’s total higher than I thought I was going to get during a time I originally thought I’d be tapering pretty severely. Long forced sojourns alone in a car fixed that. I just wish there was a better reason for it. And a much better reason for why it did eventually taper off.

Things are better now on other fronts, if not back to what I’d call normal, and I expect October to slip back closer to what I originally expected. Medium-term plans are also blown up and I don’t know what the rest of the year looks like yet. There’s still a lot of driving to come where I’m alone in the car, if not as much as there has been, but the days in between those large dictation days are likely to be lighter.

Be well, everyone.