A Week of Writing: 3/26/18 to 4/1/18

One more week in the trenches working on various writing projects. Here’s how it all shook out, complete with word count goals, short story sundries, and submission shenanigans.

The Novel

As I said last week, my big project for the moment is a horror novel called “Late Risers.” I’m making pretty good progress, with a weekly goal of 15,000 words, which I often fall short of. Still, I have a minimum do-or-die goal of 10,000 words I can hit pretty routinely. Here’s how I did this week.

Date	Day	Words Written
3/26/2018	Monday	0
3/27/2018	Tuesday	2516
3/28/2018	Wednesday	0
3/29/2018	Thursday	0
3/30/2018	Friday	2553
3/31/2018	Saturday	2091
4/1/2018	Sunday	2852

As you can see, I struggled early in the week to get going but managed to turn it on for the weekend. I ended up with 10,012 words for the week, which put me at 53,500 words in total. That’s a bit over half-way to a first draft, so I’m pretty happy with that. If I can keep this up, I expect to have a first draft by the end of the month.

Short Stories

No new short stories this week, but I did outline an urban fantasy story tentatively called “Deep Water.” I like the idea, and we’ll see if I can get some real work done on it this week.

Submissions

An average week for submission volume.

• Submissions Sent: 2
• Rejections: 1
• Submission Status Query: 1
• Shortlist: 0
• Withdrawal: 0

I currently have eleven submissions in rotation at the moment.

Story	Date Sent	Days Out	Avg Response
Caroline1	6/24/2017	282	261
A Small Evil	11/9/2017	144	65
The Scars You Keep	1/7/2018	85	123
Scare Tactics1	1/18/2018	74
When the Lights Go On2	1/25/2018	67	40
Bites	2/8/2018	53
A Point of Honor	2/18/2018	43	10
Old as the Trees	2/28/2018	33	24
What Kind of Hero	3/24/2018	9	119
Two Legs	3/26/2018	7	32
Scar	3/29/2018	4	40

1. Reprint
2. Shortlisted

As I said last time, a few of these stories are beyond the average response time, so I should hear back soon. I did send a submission status query to one of these publishers, mostly because the wait time is much longer than what I’ve previously experienced with the market. That could simply mean they’ve had a lot more submission than usual, or it could mean a lost submission. I sent a polite query letter basically to rule out the latter.

Goals

Again, I’d very much like to hit 15,000 words on the novel this week, but, as usual, I’ll settle for 10,000. I accepted a contract for game design project, and I need to get the outline for that going. It’s not due for a couple of weeks, but I’d like to get ahead of the deadline. As always, I have a whole bunch of short stories just crying out to be finished, revised, submitted, and so on, and I’ll try to get to a few of those as well.

Story Spotlight

This week, since baseball season is in full swing, I’ll ask you to head on over to Pseudopod and listen to my vampire baseball story “Night Games.” The narration by Rish Outfield is simply superb, and I think the story is pretty okay too. 🙂

Listen to “Night Games“

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And that was my week. Tell me about yours in the comments.