A Week of Writing: 5/14/18 to 5/20/18

Another week of writing gone by. Lots of business as usual and one fairly momentous accomplishment.

Here are the details.

The Novel

The first draft is done. The novel is an actual thing that exists somewhere other than my head. There’s still a lot of work to do before it’s fit to be read by other humans, but it’s damn nice to have the first draft in the can. Instead of telling you how much I wrote for the week, I’ll give you the final stats for the first draft:

• Total Word Count: 92,684
• Chapters: 32
• Date Started: 1/24/18
• Date Finished: 5/14/18

The first draft ended up right about where I thought it would in terms of word count. For a horror novel, between 80,000 and 90,000 words is a solid length, and my guess is that my critique partners will get something around 85,000 words after my first pass. It took me a bit under four months to write the first draft, 111 days to be exact. That’s not too bad, especially since I took two weeks off in the middle to work on another project.

Short Stories

I outlined two more short stories last week, and put about 1,000 words into a first draft on one of them. I stalled out a bit because of another project I’m working on, but I should get back to short stories in the very near future.

Submissions

A couple of submissions and a couple of rejections last week.

• Submissions Sent: 2
• Rejections: 2
• Acceptances: 0
• Publications: 0

I sent out submissions #55 and #56 for the year. Still on pace to hit my goal of 100 for 2018 (and then some). I’ve got fourteen submissions pending, and four of those have been waiting over 100 days. I hope to hear back from at least one of them this week.

Other Projects

I have a game design project due next month, and I’ve been making good progress on it. Last week I put 8,000 words into it, and I’m close to a first draft. I’m well ahead of my deadline and feeling pretty good about what I’ve got so far.

The Blog

Two blog posts last week. I’m gonna try for three again this week.

5/14/18: A Week of Writing: 5/7/18 to 5/13/18

Business as usual.

5/16/18: New Author Starter Kit – Submission Prep

In this post, I compiled a list of six things I think you should have ready to go before you send your first submission. If you’re new to the submission biz, give it a look. I’ll follow up this week with part two, Acceptance Prep.

Goals

The goals this week are to finish the first draft of my game design project and start the first pass on the first draft of the novel.

Story Spotlight

This week it’s another bit of flash I published with The Molotov Cocktail. This is one is called “Night Walk,” and it took second place in The Molotov’s FlashFuture contest a couple of years ago. It’s a slightly different spin on the undead apocalypse, and, fun fact, if/when I publish a collection of short fiction, Night Walk is one of the front runners for the title of said hypothetical collection.

Read “Night Walk”

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That was my week. How was yours?