31 January 2016

Plausible simulacrum of progress

Word count screenshot for 2016-01-31
13,418 is pretty poor for January.   Less than half the goal rate.  Though this is all of Eugenia's narrative thread, and now I get to go write Blossom's, which could theoretically be easier.  I've had longer to get to know Blossom.

On the plus side, _Safely You Deliver_'s first-stage copy edit came back and got turned around.  The cover designer has been activated, quotation permission has been obtained, and it's feeling disturbingly real.

Posted by Graydon at 23:09
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4 comments:

SaintPeter said...

Is there some obvious place that I can follow you to be informed of future releases of your books? I guess this blog?

Also, you're speaking about Commonwheal 4 . . . is there a 3 I should be on the lookout for?

20:35
Graydon said...

You know what? I'm going to make a post.

21:25
ctate said...

By way of calibration: 13418 words in a month is over 430 words a day. I've been told that a common benchmark for a full-time author averaged out to ~one page per day overall, back when "one page" meant double spaced pica typewritten manuscript. That works out to ~250 words per page.

Feeling motivated is no ill thing, however. :)

16:36
Graydon said...

Well, true, but that was also back when there were many fewer books being published and 40,000 words seemed like a sensible cutoff for the distinction between novel and novella.

130,000 words -- the average length of a Commonweal book so far -- in eight months (because life, creative recuperation, and fussing with the publishing process tend to eat the other four) is 35 weeks. Which means I should write 3,715 words per week. More or less 16,000 words per month. And not all the months will be good months, so aiming for 20,000 isn't a bad plan.

So, yeah, a thousand words a day is somewhat ambitious, but it has happened for reasonably lengthy periods of time. And at the present rate (nothing like that), I'm having to think about skipping 2017 for Commonweal novels and publishing the Doorstop instead. (A trick I can only pull once, but it would be nice to get the Doorstop out into the world.)

19:31

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