The Recap – June 2022

All right. Let’s see where all this productivity came from. Let’s see how many hours it took to get all this shit done.

• The Finest Creation of an Artful God: 2 Hours
  • I just needed to incorporate feedback and do a couple revision passes to get this done. It didn’t take too long. This story is now out on submission.
• Something Sulfurous: 11.5 Hours
  • This was a big job – the final revision pass of an entire novel. It took a bit of time, spread out across a couple of weeks. But it’s done, and I am so proud of the book I ended up with. Now if I can just find an agent that loves it as much as I do…
• Victoria: 8.5 Hours
  • That it took less than nine hours to finish this book… Is at once hilarious and depressing. This draft plagued me. It haunted me, whispering that it was there and needed worked on when I did literally ANYTHING else. but it intimidated me. It’s a little book full of big things. A little book trying to do a lot. And it’s my most challenging manuscript from a craft perspective. And I think I was afraid of it, in some ways. But it’s done. Done done done. Well, the rough draft is, at least. I’ll worry about revisions later.
• Fanfic: 7.5 Hours
  • With all my original fiction projects suddenly “done”, I have a lot of free time to hammer out fanfic! As a treat.
• Reading: 27 Hours
  • Migraines always lead to listening to an audiobook. It’s my one good thing from being debilitated. I lay in the dark and listen to stories. 
• Willamette Writers Meetings: 13.5 Hours
  • With summer here, I suddenly have more time to go to meetings! Hooray!
• Podcast: 0 Hours
  • I don’t want to talk about it. 
• Working out: 1 Hour
  • Kinda hard to workout when you’re convalescing. Just saying.
• Website Management: 13 Hours
  • The website has seen consistent updates, as well as the Newsletter going out on time. So… lots of good things happening there!
• Story Submissions: .5 Hours
  • Summer months are slow for publishing. but finishing a new story means I spent a little bit of time sifting through potential markets, personalizing a cover letter, and sending off the submission per the market’s guidelines. It can be tedious, but it’s worth it. And I’ve got it down to a pretty good routine by now.
• Querying: 4 Hours
  • If short story submissions are tedious… I don’t know how to describe the querying process. Agents are harder to research than markets. What they want, and how they want it, is harder to find. There doesn’t seem to be an actual industry standard as far as what an agent wants in a “Query Package” and failing to follow their individual guidelines is grounds for instant rejection. Which I get. They get thousands of queries a week! You gotta be able to thin the heard quickly, and if a writer isn’t willing to follow your guidelines, would you want to work with them? I don’t begrudge agents their rules, I just wish it didn’t take so damn long to sort through it all. But, now that the initial round of submissions is done, I’m hopeful that it won’t take this long again. 
• Roe v. Wade writing: 1 Hour
  • I wrote a story and a poem in response to the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Are they good? Probably not. Did they help? Probably not. But it felt REALLY good to write from a place of absolute fury. If you’re a Newsletter subscriber, you saw one of the poems in this month’s newsletter, (if you’d like to subscribe, you can do so here!) but I doubt the story will ever see the light of day. That’s okay. Some writing can be just for me. 

Total Hours: 89.5

Can I just say… I’m really fucking sick of being sick. I feel like I’ve spent so much time feeling unwell this spring. Whether a cold, COVID, or migraines, I’ve just spent so much time under the weather. And I think that’s some bullshit. Even now, I’m coming off a migraine (day three, babeyy) and it’s still twinge-ing and generally being a little bitch. And I am so over it. That said, this is by far my most productive month. Look at that word count? Those hours? And the majority of it happened in the past two weeks. Thank goodness I’m vaccinated, or I’m betting I would have been MUCH less productive. 

I also want to be clear, if you are ill and home sick from work… Uh. Don’t fucking work. I’m doing writing work that is for ME while I am (basically) unemployed for the summer. I am not doing work for someone else or for some corporation while ill. Nope. Nope nope nope. Never ever. Don’t do that. Okay?