April saw a dramatic improvement in writing progress over what was accomplished in March (although that certainly doesn’t take too much to achieve!).  And yes, before everyone begins to comment about this, I’m aware that it’s already the beginning of June and that I’m long overdue with this post.  The reason is quite simple and profoundly exciting:  I am the proud father of new baby twins, born on May 6, and so I have been busy busy busy with quite a few other things besides writing in the last few months!

Now, to return to April writing progress.  In April I achieved:

April, 2014:  7,903 words

I’m solidly into The Emerald Veil now and beginning to pick up steam, so I’m hoping that over the coming months I’ll be able to get a first draft finished up.  Until then, happy diaper changing!  Or happy reading, as the case may be  :-)

This is one of those months where I’m just going to cut right to the chase, such as it is:

March, 2014:  928 words

Hey, it’s better than zero, right?  And it leaves lots of room for improvement next month  :-)  The good news is that I finished my edits on Shattered and sent it off to the editing team.  I’m hoping to publish Shattered sometime around the end of the month, give or take.  I’ve also dipped my toes back into the waters of Mirythir, and I’m looking forward to really getting rolling on The Emerald Veil.  Look for some better word count numbers for April.

In the meantime, I hope that you are all enjoying a lovely spring!  Talk to you again in a few weeks  :-)

February turned out to be another busy month with a lot going on, but I was able to make good progress on several different projects, which was a lot of fun.  I’ve been doing more rewriting on Shattered than I originally expected, so I’m still working on that (although I really do think that I’m almost done with it now).  I also did some plotting for The Emerald Veil, book two of the Mirynthir Chronicles.  And last but not least, I actually started the first few chapters of a romance novel.  Sometimes it’s fun to have two or three different projects going on so that you can bounce back and forth between them.  Once I finish my edits for Shattered in the next week or so, I imagine that soon I’ll be focusing the majority of my attention on The Emerald Veil.  I’m excited to jump back into the world of Mirynthir.  Between all of the different February projects, I ended up with:

February, 2014:  16,277 words

All in all not a bad month, and while I’m still behind on my yearly word count, I’m anticipating that the word count will start picking up once I’m off and running on The Emerald Veil.  Until next month, happy reading–and if you live somewhere cold and snowy, like me, stay warm and dry!

I’m a little late getting to the monthly writing update this time . . . you blink once or twice and somehow it’s already the middle of February.  Crazy!  January saw me finish the rough draft of Shattered and make good progress on the edits.  I’m finishing up my first-round edits now, and soon the novel will be off to the editing team.  In terms of word count, my January progress was:

January, 2014:  8,447 words

Not the flashiest start to the year, and for those of you who are accomplished at division, I’m already behind the average pace needed to hit my 200,000 word goal for the year.  But it’s still early, and word count progress does tend to be slower while editing, so I’m not too concerned.  I’m looking forward to getting Shattered out there for you all to read!  I’m guessing that it’s going to be late March or possibly early April when it’s ready, but it’s in the pipeline.

I hope that you’ve all had a great start to the new year and that you’re happily devouring some great new books!  Let me know if you stumble on any gems–I’ve always got my ears to the ground looking for a great new read!

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what goals I should set for myself in 2014.  Some of them are pretty easy to settle on.  I want to finish up Shattered and publish it.  I want to finish and publish the second book in the Mirynthir Chronicles series, The Emerald Veil.  I think that I should be able to meet both of these objectives during the coming year.  What I’m not exactly sure about is how many words I’ll be able to squeeze into the next twelve months.  Some authors like to set production goals for themselves and others like to set word goals.  Being a numbers-oriented person, I’ve always had a certain fascination with word-count goals.  And besides, it sounds more impressive to say that you’ve written 200,000 words than to say that you’ve published two novels, right?

The only thing that’s making me a little hesitant to call out a word-count goal is that I know for a fact that 2014 is going to be a super crazy year.  My wife and I are expecting twins in a couple of months (surprise!  We just found out the exciting news a few days ago, and I’m still not sure if it’s quite fully sunk in yet!).  I am anticipating several months with very little sleep and very little time to do much of anything except chase our older daughter around the house and take care of the new little ones.  But then I think back to 2013 and realize that I had quite a few low-productivity months last year as well.

So I think that I’m going to go ahead and shoot for a repeat of last year’s goal:

The goal:  200,000 words

We’ll just take it one month at a time and see how things go.  And hopefully at the end of the year I’ll be able to put up another blog post celebrating a successfully met goal!  I hope that everyone has a great start to the new year, and for those who are setting goals and making resolutions for themselves, I wish you all the best in keeping them!

Now that 2013 is over, it’s time to tally up my words for the year and see how they stack up against the goals that I laid out for myself last January.  My goal for the year was 200,000 words, and my actual writing for the year totaled:

2013:  221,020 words

In other words, I MADE IT!!!!!  [Brief interlude for a jolly little dance around the room.]  Looking back over the month-by-month writing progress for the year, there were definitely some months with really high levels of productivity and other months that were rather slow on the productivity front.  That’s certainly to be expected, especially when editing (which was doesn’t produce many new words) is thrown into the mix along with the usual work and family commitments.  But I have to confess that I am quite proud at achieving my goal!

Over the course of the year I finished publishing my initial series of short stories and then published a short story collection featuring all five fantasy adventures.  I finished my first novel, Awakening from the Shadows, the first in an epic fantasy series that I am itching to get back to.  And I’ve nearly finished the first draft for a thriller novel that has been much harder to write than anticipated but that I’m excited to be able to share with you in a few months.

2013 has been a great year, and I’m looking forward to what 2014 will bring.  Speaking of which, it’s time to set some goals for the new year…

As I suspected, December turned out to be a very busy month with work and then visiting with family, so not a whole lot of writing happened.  I am nearly finished with a first draft of Shattered, and I am still anticipating accomplishing the major editing in January, which would keep me on track with my updated schedule.  The grand total for December progress was:

December, 2013:  5,088 words

Like I said, a slow month, but still incremental progress.  I’m expecting that January should be back to being a more typical writing month, although the overall word count for January will also likely be a little lower since I’ll be spending a lot of the month editing.  But before we worry about next year, it’s time to tally up the accomplishments of this past year and see how they stack up against my original 2013 writing goals (see the next post for all the details)!

Well, December has certainly been a busy month so far (as you can probably tell from the fact that I’m posting my November progress update halfway through December and not in the first few days!).  I’m expecting that it will continue to be busy for the rest of the month between work and time with family.  November ended up having its fair share of busyness as well.  It’s always seemed a little odd to me that NaNoWriMo is in November and not, say, January or August.  Because part of what’s important in November (as well as in December) is taking a little extra time away from the writing and away from the other things that keep us busy and instead enjoying the gift of family.  We hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, and my wife did an admirable job filling the table with enough delicious food to keep us all happy and full for a week.  My daughter even made a surprise appearance, as she–no doubt sensing something special afoot–refused to go down for her nap and instead spent Thanksgiving dinner ensconced in her highchair eating marshmallows (which was the only way we could keep her in the highchair for the entire meal).

As far as writing goes, I ended up having a fairly strong writing month in November, though I did fall short of the ambitious goal of 50,000 words that I set for myself.  As it turned out, here’s what I accomplished:

November, 2013:  31,610 words

So all in all, not too shabby.  I didn’t quite finish the first draft of Shattered, but I’m definitely in the home stretch.  I’ve adjusted my goals (which are often initially ambitious) to what I think is a somewhat more reasonable timeframe:  finish the rough draft in December, finish my internal editing in January, send it out to the editing team in February, and then publish in March.  We’ll see how it goes, but this new schedule for Shattered feels reasonable to me.  I should be able to finally get started on The Emerald Veil in January.  More than likely, that will push The Emerald Veil’s release back into the second half of 2014, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.  In the meantime, I’m focused on putting the finishing touches on Shattered and making it the best book it can be.

I hope that you all have a blessed Christmas and a wonderful start to the new year!

So this month I’ve been working on a political/terrorism thriller novel.  I’m finally getting towards the home stretch on it, but it’s definitely been more challenging to write than I had anticipated that it would be.  I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve had a lot more “stuck” moments on this book than I did on Awakening from the Shadows, even though I pretty much know where I’m going as far as the overall plot and specific scenes.  Really the only thing to do when that happens is to just keep on writing, putting one sentence in front of the next, and eventually you make progress and you get there.  October also turned out to be an extremely busy month at work, so that also meant less time for writing than I was originally anticipating.  So for the month of October I ended up with:

October, 2013:  13,884 words

Still forward progress, even if it was less than I was originally hoping for.  Now we’re into November, which is NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month)–a month-long challenge to write a 50,000 word novel.  I’m not exactly going to do the standard NaNoWriMo challenge, but I’m still going after it in spirit.  Looking back over my monthly totals, the most I’ve written in a month so far this year was in April, when I hit 48,015 words.  So my plan for this month is to top that.  I’m aiming for 50,000 words, spread across finishing Shattered (the thriller novel) and starting up The Emerald Veil (book 2 in the Mirynthir Chronicles).  If I’m able to hit that goal, it will make me a happy (and probably tired) writer.  We’ll see how it goes . . . wish me luck!