My mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read.
Writing
Signed & returned a contract for a short story this morning! “Harrold of the Gods” will appear in the online magazine "ZNB Presents” on May 15th. If you’re a member of the Zombies Need Brains Patreon, you’ll be able to read it then. Otherwise you’ll have to wait for the ZNB Presents: Year Two anthology to come out in 2024.
Editing
It’s what’s been taking up my time. I’ve been working on prepping the N’Inktober stories for publication, while looking at a couple of other projects that I need to complete in the first two weeks of December.
I never thought editing would be so much work.
Three dozen regular expressions to find common problems.
Scrivener grammar & spell check.
Pro Writing Aid grammar & spell check.
Word grammar & spell check.
Listening to Word reading aloud.
Lather, rinse, repeat
... and I am still finding errors! Sheesh.
What’s interesting to me is that, thanks to my using Memtime, I now have an idea of exactly how much time it takes me to produce finished work per unit time.
Writing-wise, my N’Inktober stories came in at around 36k words total for 31 stories, and took me about 66 hours to write, or about 550 words/hours.
Now, that’s a little skewed. Keep in mind that I was literally coming up with a new story every evening. I was changing tone, genre, POV, and other parameters from day to day. That writing time also includes an initial read-over first pass of editing from my wife. When I’ve worked on a single project over time, I’ve averaged more like 900 - 1000 words/hour.
In terms of editing, that same 36k words look like they’re going to take me 18-20 hours to refine. So I’m editing about 1800 words per hour - twice as fast as I write. All told, for this project, at least, I'm averaging about 450 finished words/hour; and for a steadier project, like a novel, I can probably do more like 600 finished words/hour.
What’s interesting to me is that implies that if I can keep up with writing & editing about 10 hours a week, I’m capable of writing around 300k words/year. That’s a couple of novels and a dozen short stories, if I want.
It’s interesting to see how it all adds up.
Reading
Given all the editing I’m doing, I thought it might be a good idea to start in on Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.
It’s a decent book so far, but honestly nothing that I've not heard before. Show don't tell, watch your POV, use language to establish or close narrative distance, etc. It is presented very well, with a number of examples and exercises, though.
Other
Lots of activity on the Day Job. I’m pushing to get my edits on the N’Inktober stories done this week because the way things are working out, the first few weeks of December are going to be filled with some very focused development work. It’s good stuff, and the kind of thing that I enjoy, though. So long as I still manage to get some writing and editing time in, I’ll be happy!
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