6823 words written in January I thought was a strong start to the year. I am happy with this. In February and March, I had trouble keeping up the momentum falling to 4719 and 4577 words. April 8069 words.
The Ballad of Black Tom on Kobo
My goal is 250 words a day. Some days I reach close to 500, others 1000. The goal of 250 words a day is not that unreachable and I can make it within the thirty or so minutes I have to write. It’s fairly funny to see that in February I fell to 3190 since I had even set aside a weekend to give all my attention to writing and revising but instead spent it relaxing and reading The Ballad of Black Tom. My wife and I did manage to play a couple of games, several short of what I had wanted to do but, our baby was with us so life- well, didn’t belong to us alone.
In either case, both February and March were months filled with a lot of extra events that took time and energy. Goals for the year didn’t receive 100% of my attention. Add to the mix beyond family and work, I am truly thankful that I had any chance to do any writing and get everything else in.
A great win in early March is that I finished my first solid draft of my first novella. This is a big step for me who has written nothing beyond eBay, Facebook posts or Tweets.
What am I talking about here? In 2014 I decided to start trying to write. In college I majored in English Lit., so writing is not beyond me- for those that really know me. I wrote a lot in college and highschool. I enjoy writing and always have. Something happened where I realized the work it would take to get as good as I wanted to be just wasn’t in me- but this is another topic for another occasion.
When I picked up the quill again I wrote different things- I started this blog, review- well, ‘blog’ thing. Being able to occasionally play some D&D, I wrote some short adventures-never finished them though. I further wrote short bits, bits that I find out now are scenes. I was calling then ‘vignettes,’ but there were scenes. The difference to me is that a scene is part of a larger body of work. A vignette is something unto itself. My scenes comprised things like a pair of adventurers running down an old hallway pursued by a pack of goblins. A lonely man contemplating his life. An alien being found here on earth and peoples reactions to it. You get the idea and yes, there was a strong Sci-fy bent to everything. I also found myself taking notes on a fantasy world. I had no sense of what I would do with these notes, but I started making them. I justified them that when I started to write something significant- these became the foundation of that larger work.
The foundation became big, and I needed a place for this foundation to be part of, so a map was in order. And it snowballed. Pictures and maps and notes. Index cards are my friends and preferred mode of note taking so I keep index cards around me and these I use for my little sketches of places and things in my fantasy world I creating. So my little idea was getting bigger. My writing progress is forward but feelings more like a welcome release of all the multitude of ideas I’ve been working on for the last several years. This 250 words a day has led me to developing a habit of 250 words a day and a finished novella. That’s pretty good, in my estimation.
The Ballad of Black Tom on Kobo
I’m uncertain when it happened or precisely how it happened but sometime ago I decided to read everything and practically anything. So the benefit of this was I found new authors I liked and read multiple bits of their writing. The disadvantage of this was that I read a few I didn’t care for.