Well, damn. A whole month gone already? I always feel like time goes entirely too fast, but add in the pandemic’s particular brand of time blindness and realizing the date can be downright bewildering. I feel like January was an unusually good month for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this consistently productive. I don’t want to jinx it, but I think… I think I’m back!
January
- Revise Tavi
- Write 5k words
- Read at least three books
How'd I Do?
- Revise Tavi
- YES! YES YES YESYESYES! I did it! I not only finished revisions on time, but also got them entered into the computer, compiled in a single doc, formatted, and sent to my beta reader tribe!
- Write 5k words
- Nope. It wasn’t nothing, just not quite 5k. While I’m happy that I was able to get some words down, I’m largely disappointed with my drafting output in January.
- Read at least three books
- Yep! Made it to four, so I’m keeping up with my Goodreads Challenge!
Total Word Count: 3,001
Hours Check
This is a new segment(?) of the blog, mainly because tracking my time spent on projects is a new habit for me. Basically, when it became clear that word count wasn’t a motivating metric for tracking progress on Victoria, I knew I needed to come up with some other way to define success. Victoria “V.E.” Schwab posts on her socials about how she tracks time in a grid each month. My new planner has a grid sheet for every week, so I thought I’d give it a try. And guess what? I loved it!
So, here’s a look at how I spent my time in January:
- Tavi Revisions: 14.5 Hours
- This includes time spent revising, entering revisions, and formatting/sending the finished draft to betas
- Victoria Rough Draft: 2 Hours
- This is any time spent actively drafting the novel
- Reading: 16 Hours
- Time spent reading/listening to books
- Willamette Writers Meetings: 12 Hours
- Time spent in or prepping for some sort of Willamette Writers meeting, including my SFF Critique Group
- Website Management: 10 Hours
- This is time spent updating the site, as well as writing/publishing/promoting blog posts and newsletters
- Short Story Submissions: 3 Hours
- This is time spent researching markets and prepping manuscripts for submission, as well as checking/updating my submissions on The Submission Grinder
- Podcast: 6 Hours
- This includes time spent recording, editing, publishing and promoting an episode
Total Hours: 64
That’s averages to 16 hours a week! It really drives home the feeling that writing is a part-time job when I look at the time spent like this. Doing some (very) rough math, I only get about 80 hours/week that is my own time — hours not spent at work or asleep. And 16 of those hours went to something writing/reading related. That’s a committment.
So, now that I have this data, what am I going to do with it?
February
- Spend at least 16 hours with Victoria
- This is about 4 hours/week. Which, was a struggle last month, BUT there’s no looming novel revision. There’s no other big project this month, just a couple smaller ones. And I really want to get a big chunk of words down on this book.
- Prep Tavi Query Letter and Synopses
- Part of getting a novel ready to query is prepping the other materials in the query package. What’s included in a query package will vary by agent, but most will want more than just the query letter itself. Common requirements are a 1-3 page synopsis (varies by agent) as well as the first 10-15 pages. So, I’m going to use February to draft, revise, and perfect my query letter, three versions of the synopsis (1pg, 2pgs, and 3pgs), and create documents for the first 10 and 15 pages. That’s a bit of work, but it’ll be nice to have them done when I get Tavi back from beta readers.
- Read four books
- I’m a firm believer that, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So, I’m going to read about a book a week in February.
And that’s the month ahead. It’s a bit, and February is a short month, but I feel really good about it. Mostly because my brain feels so free with Tavi checked off as “done.” Granted, I know that come March I’ll have more work to do — more tweaking and editing and perfecting — but for now? It’s done. Done as I can make it, which mean it is out of my brain and in a handful of trusted inboxes.
Until then, it’s Rough Draft-landia for me!
I am toying with an idea for a post breaking down my revision process for Tavi. I think it’d be interesting to sort of dissect the work and share that with y’all. So, hopefully I’ll be back later this week with another post!
Until then, Bloggos!
BZ
