A Week of Writing: 4/16/18 to 4/22/18
Another week gone by, another week of of writing. More positive yardage and some decent progress on projects big and small.
The Novel
More production this week at a fairly respectable pace. I’m in the meat of the third act, and I’m looking at another 15,000 or so words to finish up this first draft. My best guesstimate is the draft will clock in somewhere just south of 90,000 words. Here’s how I did.
| Date | Day | Words Written |
| 4/16/2018 | Monday | 0 |
| 4/17/2018 | Tuesday | 2557 |
| 4/18/2018 | Wednesday | 2505 |
| 4/19/2018 | Thursday | 0 |
| 4/20/2018 | Friday | 508 |
| 4/21/2018 | Saturday | 1720 |
| 4/22/2018 | Sunday | 1536 |
This all adds up to another 8,826 words of writing. I’d have liked 10,000. Hell, I’d have liked 15,000, but this is what I had in me for the week.
Short Stories
I’m always working on short stories, and as much as I love writing novels, the short stuff scratches a different creative itch. Last week I polished up another couple of trunk stories, though calling them that isn’t quite fair. They’re stories that have been sitting on my hard drive in first-draft form for quite a while. I took them out, dusted them off, and found an angle I liked to complete/polish them. I submitted one (and it was rejected) and the other is back from my beta readers and should go out this week.
Submissions
Three submission for the week, which brings my total for the month to eleven.
- Submissions Sent: 3
- Rejections: 2
- Acceptances: 0
- Publications: 0
I currently have fifteen submissions under consideration. Still waiting to hear back from a short-listed story, plus one I’ve been waiting on for four months. I also have a story that’s getting close to 300 days pending, and I’m honestly not sure I’ll hear back on that one anytime soon (they just sent a 395-day rejection). The rest are (mostly) in the 20- to 30-day range.
The Blog
Three more updates on the ol’ blog last week.
4/16/18: A Week of Writing: 4/9/18 to 4/15/18
You guessed it. The week of writing before this one.
4/18/18: 200 Rejections: An Analysis
The meat and potatoes post for the blog. This post takes a look back at the 200-plus rejections I’ve received since I started logging them at Duotrope.
4/20/18: One-Hour Flash – Fuel for the Fire
Another bit of flash fiction written in one hour. Not a bad concept, but a serious case of all premise and not much story.
Goals
It’s really all about the novel in the coming weeks, and just about everything else will take a back seat. I’d like to finish that first draft by the middle of next week. I think that’s doable, and I”m hoping for that burst of frenetic energy that often comes when you’re close to finishing a big project. Well, the first major part of a big project anyway.
Story Spotlight
This week, check out the first story I published with The Arcanist. This one is called “Cowtown,” and it’s a little horror/sci-fi/humor mashup set in my own hometown of Modesto, California.
Read “Cowtown“
And that was my week. How was yours?
4 Comments on “A Week of Writing: 4/16/18 to 4/22/18”
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Effectively Wild – A Baseball Horror Story
Night Walk & Other Dark Paths
Acts of War: Flashpoint
Acts of War: Aftershock
Acts of War: Stormbreak
Aeryn Rudel's Rejectomancy 
Wow! What a week you had! To be honest, I haven’t kept track of the number of words I’ve been writing each day, but I have been writing both prose and poetry each day. I’m also working on a blog post for May (it will be my first in ages).
By the way, I’m stealing your idea of publishing my blog posts on Medium, too. Actually, I haven’t posted anything on Medium in a while, so I figured, “Why not put blog posts on it?”
Also, I sent out four submissions last week.
Well, even though I’m pretty sure cross-posting blog posts on Medium is a completely original idea, I will allow you to steal it. 😉
Cool stuff. Good luck on wrapping the novel…
Would love to hear about your Beta Reader process. How you find/select them? Whether you also read their stuff? And whether or not you find it useful? And how you determine WHAT is useful?
Thanks. Yeah, I haven’t actually tackled the beta reader thing on the blog, but it’s a good subject to cover. I’m lucky to have some good ones.