For those of you who don't know, I love statistics. I keep meticulous track of all my writing progress, down to the individual word counts each day. It keeps me focused and keeps me moving forward. You can see my progress from the last two quarters here and here.
This quarter was pretty goddamn awesome. Here's my progress on a week-by-week basis:
- 7/6: 13,821 words written
- 7/13: 20,275
- 7/20: 21,067
- 7/27: 19,120
- 8/3: 19,861
- 8/10: 9,889
- 8/17: 8,537
- 8/24: 15,066
- 8/31: 25,613
- 9/7: 20,111
- 9/14: 13,513
- 9/21: 12,534
- 9/28: 8,706
That's a total of 208,113 words written this quarter, or just shy of 70k per month. Easily my best quarter ever. I've spent a lot of time writing in the afternoons immediately after work, and it's doubled my production. So what projects did I work on?
- Spore: 86,000 words added. This is a techno-thriller about a man who is admitted into a secretive drug trial. I finished up the first draft in July, and have been letting it 'rest' before I go into edits later this month.
- Pillars of Wrath: 20,000 words added. The first in the Books of Bathyly series. This work was the third and fourth drafts, which included changes after getting feedback from my beta readers, and lots of rearranging (originally it was almost 200k words, but I split it in half). I'm finishing up the final draft now. Then it'll head to my editor, and on to agents/publishers after that!
- Born of Sand: 66,000 words. This is Book 5 of my Tales of a Dying Star series. Finished up the first draft last week, edits and beta reading through November, with an expected December release time.
- The House on Hollow Hill: 25,000 words. This is a CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) book for a project I'm working on with a writing buddy of mine. More details on that coming next Spring!
- TP-03: 10,000 words. This was a short story about a small robot built to help its master around a workshop. The story is complete and currently on submission to a few of the big science fiction publications.
As you can see it's been a fantastic quarter. Almost entirely fresh writing, with very little editing. That's about to change, though. My goals for the final quarter of 2015:
- Write the first draft of Tales of a Dying Star #6
- Write the first draft of Sand and Sorrow (Books of Bathyly #2)
- Write two more short stories for submission.
- Finish editing and publish Born of Sand (Tales of a Dying Star #5)
- Finish editing Pillars of Wrath and submit to agents.
- Finish editing Spore and submit to agents.
I have a few other projects mulling around, but those above are the big items I want to hit. I doubt I'll hit 200,000 words again since I have three big projects that need editing, but hey, I suppose that's a good problem to have!