Life, Writing, Weirdness

I few days later than I planned. Busy week, but that’s par for the current course.

I spent a lot of October establishing a new normal that still involved weekly trips to another city for reasons that haven’t gotten any better. My dictation in the car seemed to slow a little bit and I only had three 10,000-word travel days, but I did have nine days when I broke 5,000 and six of those were between 7,000 and 9,000. Pushing things a bit on weekends, and still not counting academic writing, October came out to a fairly staggering 133,930 words, which is now my record for a single month’s raw output, edging out last month.

Now, the usual breakdown for plotting, drafting, and editing for fiction and non-fiction progress:

• Plotting on the third Valkyr Station novel has been deliberately negligible. I’m still deciding on the overall major plot points.
• First Draft Fiction: 21.0k words on Heroic Genesis, and with the amount of plot remaining, I’m currently projecting being done sometime in the middle of November.
• A total of 6 blog posts, the best month since July, though still not great.
• The Memory Project: 78.7k words, spread across Volume 5 (now currently projecting as ~65% complete), Volume 6 (~50%), and Volume 7 (now basically caught up to present). All three of these need some substantial dictation cleaning, but that can be later. I also made some real progress on the commentary and ancient dictation cleaning on Volume 5B (the journals and blogs that match up with the Volume 5 timeline) and this should be basically done before the end of the year. Plus a little bit of work on a couple of the volumes that aren’t directly about me.
• 6 non-haiku poems.
• 6 songs, two of which were completions of parodies I started at some point in the past, and one was the extension of a first verse that’s been in my head since I was commuting back and forth to a distant city when my kids were small.
• 6 journal entries that weren’t handwritten.

Word count summary:

• A total of 37,165 words of new fiction,
• 2,509 words of net change during edits. All 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.
• A mere 350 words of plotting on Valkyr Station Book 3, but I’ve been actively letting that one sit in the back of my mind. And there were 2159 other words that went into plotting on another project
• 92,231 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project, blog posts, poetry transcriptions, and so on.

I had expected October to slip back closer to what I originally planned but the extra driving has still given me a boost. Thesis work is still the name of the game during daylight hours, and the further I look into the future between now and thesis defense, the less sure I am about what my personal writing looks like, although I am starting the end-of-the-year sketch of revised 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10-year plans.

But November is a new month, as every month is.

Be well, everyone.