It’s late on a Saturday night, so I’m going to keep this post short before I head off to bed, but I wanted to check in with a quick update on my writing progress for May. May was a really exciting month for several reasons. First of all, I finished the rough draft for my first novel, The Awakening. I’ve been working on/thinking about/planning this novel for a loooooooong time, so it’s gratifying to finally have it written down from start to finish! I’m in the midst of editing right now, and I hope to have the editing finished up sometime in June. I also released my short story collection, Fantastical Tales, in May, and I learned how to draw fantasy maps in GIMP. Not to toot my own horn here, but I’m rather proud of the map that I put together for the lands of Mirynthir that are found in The Awakening. And lastly, I was able to maintain the high degree of productivity that I had for April. I didn’t spend quite as many hours working and didn’t end up with quite as high of a word count, but hey, I’m still happy with what I’ve got:
May, 2013: 37,911 words
I’m expecting that June will be a little slower on the word count front as I will be fully in the editing swing of things, and you don’t really produce too many words of new fiction when editing (ultimately it depends on how you do the counting, but the counting method I plan on using is simply number of words in the file at the end of the day minus the number of words in the file at the start of the day). As I think more about the editing process, I have realized that my initial plan for June release for The Awakening was hopelessly optimistic. The revised plan is going to aim for July, but not be too upset if it slips to the beginning of August. It all depends on how long my edits take plus how long the copyediting takes plus how many days are lost to summer vacations on tropical islands :-) In the meantime, happy reading and enjoy these beautiful summer days!