We are back to drafting and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Drafting is truly where I shine. It usually takes a little while for me to get into my draft but once I do and hit my stride it’s the best feeling in the world. I love the feeling of ideas coming together and things falling into place. If I can keep this pace up I will finish this draft before the end of the year and probably before Christmas.
Progress
I am firmly back into drafting mode. This has been my highest word count for any month this year, at 37k, which is an average of 1.2k. This makes sense, as I’ve been mainly revising or pseudo-revising this year so far.
I started drafting my manuscript and had 13k words before I submitted it to my writing group and they told me it wasn’t working, so I started again nearly from scratch. I am now at about 17k and the second version of the beginning is way better. I’ve now hit my stride and have averaged at least 2k every day so far this week and am on track to hit 3k in the draft today alone with another 1k for this blog. I hope to keep up this momentum as I push toward the muddy middle of my story.
WTPitch Event
We got our results today for this event and after all the waiting I didn’t get a mentor. I am choosing to believe that they didn’t think I needed one. I am honestly not as disappointed as maybe I should be, but in a way, I am glad about it. I don’t want to mess up my flow with my current project and four months to revise and do mentorship would really mess up my plans. I’m a little annoyed that I waited so long to get back to querying because of it but that is life. I’m going to submit to as many agents today as I can.
What I’m Learning
So much of publishing is a waiting game. That’s probably all I need to say as most writers are probably nodding their heads in agreement with me, but I’ll go on. You work so hard creating the best book you can, drafting over months if not years, and revising over a similar length of time. That’s a lot of time to begin with. Then we have to submit, and submit, and wait, and wait some more. Sure, I’m working on the next project, but I write faster than I can query. That may just be a me problem but I imagine I can’t be the only one who runs into this with such long wait times, especially with books that grow shorter and shorter.
One of my roommates asked me, with genuine curiosity and concern, “Why does publishing take so long” in one of our conversations. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on how you look at it, I had to get to work so the conversation was cut short. But, I did have time to tell him about the wait times for agents and editors and that it is a multi-level process where each step it feels like you’re hurrying up and waiting. By the end, I wondered to myself why of all things I picked something that takes so dang long. We writers really are a crazy bunch.
Leisure
I’ve been watching the show Leverage and it is so good. It is fairly rare for me to find a show where I like every character as much as I do with this show. I love a good heist.
Speaking of heists. I’m rereading Mistborn for at least the 8th time and it is just as good as ever. I read the first chapter of Mistborn: The Secret History and it hit me so hard in the feels from the jump, though I haven’t gone back to it yet. Mistborn is our November teen book club pick at my behest and I’m excited to hear what the teens think of it.
Looking Forward
As I usually am while in revision brain, I am optimistic about the future. There is a large part of me that wants to draft four manuscripts in a row. If I did that I’d be finished with all of them sometime in the spring I think, but then I’d have to revise them one after the other and that sounds miserable. Plus, I can write more if I overlap things the way I plan and have multiple projects that are at different stages of development because I can’t work on one project straight through since I have to send it to Alpha and Beta readers.
So I will continue writing Cut Throat and submitting it to my writing group. They should finish reading it around the beginning of 2025 and I will probably start working on the next manuscript before they finish as I will steadily gain on them since I can only submit 10k a week and I want to write at least 14k a week. That means that I could have another first draft done on another project before they are finished reading the first one. If I overlap it right and the revisions don’t take too long, then my pace could seriously pick up in 2025. As I continue to write my skills should improve, so I imagine that revisions should take less and less time. Though the “should” might be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Until next time.