July Writing Contest Results

Here're the results of the writing contest involving Lauren, Nick, and me. I wrote a total of 13,598 words, beating out Nick (13,000) but losing to Lauren (14,614). Fortunately Lauren picked a restaurant we both absolutely love for me to take her to. :)

Here's how it breaks down:

*Early in the month, I spent a lot of time editing Battle for the Wastelands, getting it down to 100,000 words in preparation for submission to #PitchMas (no luck this time) and a new batch of agents. That took up a great deal of writing time but resulted in relatively few words. I also wrote some material for a later Wastelands novel, but not a whole lot.

*I also started a new project, which I will not go into a lot of detail on at the moment. Sufficient to say it plays to my great strength (worldbuilding, technology, etc.) and avoids one of my major weaknesses (characterization). Maybe around 1,000 or so words on that. Given the threat graduate school (more on that later) will pose to my fiction-writing productivity, this could be worth shifting my focus onto.

*I broke 30,000 words on The Thing In The Woods, writing around 9,000 words this month. Three days alone in which I wrote an excess of 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 words respectively provided the bulk of that. Finishing chapters to submit them to a writing group one must commit to in advance is a powerful incentive. Still concerned it might be too short, but my plan is to finish it before

For August, I plan to write a good bit more material for Thing and do some more edits on Battle, since my friend Jeff from my Lawrenceville writing group posted a blog on some particularly-unnecessary words. However, graduate school approaches, and that will cut into my writing time considerably.

June Writing Contest Results

My writing contest with Nick, Lauren Patrick, and Sean Korsgaard continues. This past month hasn't been particularly productive. I've only written 5,056 words (give or take some new words written during the editing process I didn't track well), which puts me ahead of Lauren (who had RL obligations) but dramatically behind Nick (who totally stomped everybody with 25,000).

Although I spent a lot of the month revising Battle for the Wastelands for the coming #Pitchmas novel-pitching sessions, excuses buy no yams. Looking at my spreadsheet, I didn't do any writing at all for over half the days in the month and most of those days weren't spent marking up the Battle manuscript or working for my freelance clients. I need to get in the habit of writing every day, even if it's only a little. My writer friends James R. Tuck and Delilah S. Dawson are productivity masters (creating first drafts in only a few months, with far more responsibilities than I have) and I would do well to emulate them.

So here's what I did accomplish:

*Battle for the Wastelands manuscript is now fully marked and I've edited the first three chapters. The goal is to get to 100,000 words or less to make it more salable. I did get a nibble from a small press during a previous pitching session that ultimately lead to a rejection, but I did get some useful feedback. The same with an agent rejection that arrived during the same timeframe. I'm optimistic for #Pitchmas. :)

*I've written close to 2,000 words for the sixth Wastelands novel, tentatively entitled Consolidation. Much of this was scenes I've previously written and filed away for later, including villain Falki Grendelsson brooding on the state of race relations in his truncated empire and Catalina Merrill cowing a would-be rapist with a revolver, but a lot of it is new material pertaining to how my development of Catalina's character.

*Written a good bit of material (approximately 3,000 words) for The Thing In The Woods, including much of the fifth chapter where the monster shows up again for the first time since the prologue and a scene taking place in the town library that brings in the American Civil War. I will be bringing the first four chapters before my Lawrenceville group this coming Sunday and the prologue (which the Lawrenceville people have already critiqued) before my Kennesaw group Saturday. All this critiquing and rewriting slows the process down and jeopardizes my plan to have the first draft finished by the time grad school starts in August, but the more finished and polished the early chapters are, the less continuity editing I'll need to do later.

So here's to a better, more productive July.

May Writing Contest: The Results

Yesterday was the last day of May and thus the last day of the first month of the writing contest involving my friends Nick, Lauren, Sean, and I. The goal is to write the most fictional words, with the loser buying the winner lunch.

My word count, which I tracked per project per day on an Excel spreadsheet, was 19,154 words spread out across multiple projects. So here goes:

The Thing In The Woods-The word count went from 6,349 to 19,361. The first two chapters are completed, albeit rather short, and some great big hunks of other chapters are written. My plan now is to finish the entire first draft before I start graduate school in late August. It's young adult, so it'll probably be shorter anyway. I'm guessing it's around a third done, 40 percent on the outside. One of the biggest additions is that I've now got a romantic subplot involving the male lead, a rather snobby Buckhead transplant to a small town south of Atlanta that's rapidly turning into a bedroom community, and a local girl who's into theater. Given how my friend James R. Tuck said the big difference between young adult and adult fiction featuring teen protagonists is whether or not they're facing "grown man problems," high-school dating shenanigans will make it "younger."

(Yes, Battle for The Wastelands has a teen romance tidbit too, but it's not nearly as important. What to do about the flirtatious cowgirl Alyssa Carson takes up much less screentime so to speak than the Flesh-Eater threat to the protagonist's hometown, the starvation threat to the Merrill refugee camps, etc.)

The Cybele Incident-I went from 15,817 words to 20,215 words. This is net word count, since I ran the completed chapters through my Kennesaw writing group and they had ideas on what to cut as well as what to add. I wrote a new beginning to make the male lead Lt. Commander Thomas Briggs more sympathetic and more competent and added a new wrinkle to female lead Captain Adhirai Lakhani's battle plan to make her more sneaky-subtle as opposed to simply brutal and "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." She's genetically-engineered to be the next stage in human evolution, so having her act like an unsubtle moron kind of makes the people behind it look inept and stupid. I'm shooting for a shorter word count than Battle for The Wastelands, so I'm probably around a third finished.

The Wastelands Universe-I started writing the manuscript for the third novel in the series just so I could write down a 1,000-odd word sequence in the harem-intrigue subplot that came to me in a burst of inspiration. The second and third novels in the series give the female characters a lot more screentime, in particular the women of the villain Grendel's harem. I also started writing a sequel novella centered around Grendel's daughter Astrid, which would take place chronologically after the fourth, fifth, or possibly the sixth books. Finally, yesterday at the gym I had another burst of inspiration and wrote a 700-odd word scene that elaborates on Alyssa's character a fair bit.

I haven't gotten specific word counts from the others yet, although I'm certain I've beaten at least one of them. This coming month will be a lot tougher, since one will have more free time and the other will be more organized in tracking their word counts. Best not slack off. There are whole stretches of May where I didn't get any fiction writing done at all (15 out of 31 days, nearly half of the month). It'd be easy to blame my paying writing gigs, which have to take priority over my personal writing, but I could have still gotten some stuff done. At the very least, I could have broken 20,000 or even 25,000 words.