March Productivity!

I saw that writer A B Keuser writes a monthly post highlighting the previous month’s productivity, and that struck me as a good idea, so here’s how my month of March went! Some of this has been covered by my update post from the other day, but here are some actual numbers:

This spreadsheet is where I track my daily writing output on whatever it is that I’m drafting at the time, and then I leave notes in the next field on editing progress on other projects. So in March I wrote just over 27,000 words in Lighthouse Boy, whilst getting to the start of Act III in editing Forgotten Stars III. I averaged 876 words a day on Lighthouse, which is above my quota of 500 words a day. (I bump that quota up to 1000 words on weekends and when I’m not doing any editing, which moving forward is not likely to be terribly often, as my projects start to pile up.) Since making 500 words while also editing is obviously no problem, I’ll likely bump that up to 750 a day.

Note that when I forget to enter a day’s total, those words get added up anyway the next time I remember to update the spreadsheet, so the average is always accurate. None of those zeroes indicates a day in which I wrote nothing. Aside from wrapping February up with the flu, I haven’t failed to write at all in quite a few months. Yay, me!

On the editing front: Forgotten Stars III has been harder to edit than the previous two, because I’m finding some glaring character issues and some structural problems with the third act that all require some heavy lifting. The bad character stuff (basically, I had a character act very “not himself” in the original draft, trying to create a “Has he switched sides for real?” suspense, but when re-reading the draft, I realized that not only did it not work, it was conceptually awful, so out it came) is gone, but now I’m face-to-face with the troublesome stuff in Act III. I want to have this book to beta readers this month, so I’ve got some real work to do.

Also, I spent the first two months of this year being very sporadic on the blogging front, and I’m trying to get back in the habit of blogging regularly. I want to post something here at least once a week, and I’ve been posting a lot of stuff to Byzantium’s Shores and to Driftwood Upon the Bosporus, so I’m getting better there.

It’s also looking increasingly like I will attempt vlogging soon, so I’ve been writing notes for that and doing some tech testing. And I even wrote a little comedy sketch about the dangers of procrastination for writers that a friend and I will be filming when the weather here in Buffalo Niagara actually improves (we’ll be shooting outside and the sketch involves me getting a pie in the face), so there’s that. Busy month!

Let’s see what April brings!

(I posted that photo in various social media on April Fools Day, and it makes me happy, so it’s here, too.)