Category Archives: Writing

Back in 2010 I started logging all of my writing time, which means now I can have nifty pie charts.

So here is 2013, in charts.

I spent big chunks of time on three different books, and a bunch of short stories. While I got a lot done, it sometimes didn’t feel like I was making progress because my time was split up a lot more. I knew that already, but it’s nice to see my impression confirmed. There were good reasons for my jumping around, but I don’t want to start any more novels until two of these are done.

Some notes: These titles bear little resemblance to what the books will actually be called. About 2/3 of my logged time was spent actually working on projects. The rest includes things like critiquing, sending stories out, writing classes or books about writing, and reading slush, most of which falls under the “None” project.

The next chart breaks down how much time I spent planning, writing, and revising each project. (With all short stories lumped together, because that’s easier.)

You can’t compare one ring to the next in absolute numbers. (For example, I spent less than an hour on the Arcology book all year, but since it’s on the outer ring it looks like a lot.)

I’m happy to see a large proportion of actual writing time on most projects, since that’s the fun part of the work. Between parts of two novels and several short stories, I wrote more than 100,000 words last year.

This would be a fun chart to do for a single project or set of projects over multiple years.

I also have bar charts! (I’m sure you’re all as excited by this as I am. This is what I did on my New Year’s day holiday last week.)

That dip in July is from my two-week vacation. The spike in September is a combination of two deadlines: the Strange Chemistry open submission and a novel contest on the Codex writers forum (careful inspection of November and December will tell you that I changed my mind about which novel to enter in the contest). And despite my comment at the beginning of this post, although I worked on three different books, I mostly didn’t work on all of them at once. The only project I worked on in all 12 months of 2013 was my catch-all “short story” project (and no, it was not the same story all year).

Writing goals! The only kind I set any more. Even these are flexible.

Posted on All Rights Reserved.

I was doing a great job posting regularly before my January hacking incident. When I cut back on blogging, one of the things that I dropped was my monthly lists of things I’d posted on the blog of All Rights Reserved, my mostly local writing group.

So, here is an approximately quarterly roundup. This is not everything, just the things I still think are worth pointing out.

• Why “If you can quit, then quit” pisses me off – in which I disagree with some writing “advice”
• Fun with slush – in which I read slush
• Talent – in which I believe in talent
• Revising and writing advice – in which I examine some writing advice
• Revisiting my writing schedule – in which I…revisit my writing schedule
• Another reason to write every day – In which I’m a better writer than a programmer (though I did spend a few recent lunch hours writing a program to clean up my meeting notes for me)
• Do Less? No, thanks. – in which I disagree with myself
• Audiobooks – In which I try audiobooks

This weekend I was lucky to be able to attend a writing retreat. I love hanging out with other writers, and I’m more productive when I don’t have my house/yard/etc. around to distract me. I finished revising another chunk of my novel, revised a short story, and mostly went over all the ideas I’ve developed for the book I’m writing next and created an outline.

The writing process I’ve developed means that even though I haven’t started writing the book yet, I have 27,000 words on it. Not all of them will make it into even the first draft, much less later drafts. But it’s nice not to start from zero.

This month I’ll be finishing the rest of the novel revisions, developing a more detailed outline of the new book, and starting to put words into the actual draft.

Speaking of productivity, I’ve increased the amount of writing time I put in each week by around 50% since spring. I have the same amount of time blocked out on my schedule, but having more of it on weekends than weekday evenings means I am more likely to put the time in. This also explains the state of my yard and the half-finished pair of shorts on the sewing table.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been revising a novel to submit to Strange Chemistry while they’re taking unagented submissions. I like having a deadline to aim for.

I usually dislike revising, but this has been going well–of course, it’s also the third time I’ve gone over this book, so most of the big problems were already taken care of. It’s still taking a big chunk of my writing time, but not all of it: I’m also working on the outline of the book I want to write this winter.

Combining those two projects is taking a lot of time. Last week I didn’t quite get everything done that I wanted to, even though I hit all of my scheduled writing slots. So this week I’ll be trying to squeeze in more writing time.

Which is a very long way of saying that I haven’t gone through more photos of my July trip yet.

In other news, I sold another story to Daily Science Fiction, so look for that in a few months. I like working on books but the short production time for short stories, especially flash, is really nice.

I find that when I’m programming something, there’s a constant reward cycle going on. I make a change. “Ooh, that worked! What happens if I do this?” I make another change. “Oops. That was wrong. I’ll try this…” And so on, in a constant cycle of change, result, change, result that makes me lose track of time.

Almost like playing a game. Click here, get 10 points. Drag there, get 20 points. Click over there, release the demons, oops, try again.

Writing, on the other hand, doesn’t work that way. Revise a scene. My reward: another scene. My reward: another scene. Only 80 more to go! It’s more like worm farming in Angband, where you let the low-level worms breed and then keep killing them over and over again until you’re strong enough to do something fun.

Ok, the actual making-stuff-up, what-happens-next bit is kind of gamelike. “Ooh, she can hide in this cave! Uh oh, now she’s running from a bear and a werewolf. Hey, I wonder what happens if…” But every day of fun seems to be followed by three days of worm farming.

I think I’m going to call revising worm farming from now on. Maybe it’ll catch on.

With that, back to the worm pens I go. The slimy critters need to be culled.