Writing Update - Six months

I didn't post an update on November 20th (five months since the Great Reboot) mostly because around that time I had some computer issues and frustrations were getting the better of me.  Unfortunately I've had a similar problem this month to go with lots of formatting issues with older work, so this month is the first I haven't actually hit my monthly target.  In any case, here's a stats update on what I've written since June 20th this year.

	Name	Type	Word Count	Status
1	The Ship	Short Story	3793	Finished - to edit
2	Take me Back with You	Short Story	2528	WIP
3	Take me Back with You	Novel	35303	WIP
4	The Lost Train	Short Story	4352	WIP
5	The Other Set of Feet	Short Story	3749	Finished - to edit
6	The Hunter	Novella	18783	WIP
7	Once We Were Children	Short Story	2513	Finished - to edit
8	The Assignment	Short Story	8802	Finished - to edit
9	Never Give Up	Short Story	5111	Finished - to edit
10	Clones	Short Story	1323	Edited
11	Beat Down 1 - Clones	Serial Novella	19233	Published
12	Sunfall	Short Story	1271	WIP
13	The Tube Riders: Exile	Novel	90629	WIP
14	Beat Down 2 - The Heist	Serial Novella	18533	Published
15	Beat Down 3 - Badassaur	Serial Novella	19699	Finished - to edit
16	NaNoWriMo 2012	Novel	3714	WIP
17	Beat Down 4 - The Sneevla	Serial Novella	4015	WIP
18	Undelivered	Short Story	358	WIP
	Started June 21st	Word Count	243709
		Pages (300w/pg)	812
	6 month target (Dec 20th)	(183 days)	250000
		Ahead	-6291
		Total	Month
	One month tally:	33598	33598
	Two month tally:	62217	28619
	Three month tally:	119253	57036
	Four month tally:	180097	60844
	Five month tally:	217500	37403
	Six month tally:	243709	26209

It could certainly be worse.  I missed my six-month target but 243k in six months is pretty solid going.  However, in October I had been hoping to break 300k by now.

The biggest problem I have had is with flash drives.  I learned the hard way to make sure I back up my work after breaking a flash drive in November.  However that was just the start.  I actually saved that one, but since then I've had two fail on me and while I've been backing them up more regularly I still lost a bunch of words both times, most notably on my effort at NaNo, which I lost TWICE.  In hindsight, taking on an entirely new project for NaNo was a huge mistake, because I overestimated the amount of writing time I would have, plus I tried to push my boundaries by writing in a genre I wasn't familiar with.  While this in itself was not a big deal, I spent a lot more time writing it than I spent on more familiar projects.  It all started well, then I lost six thousand words.  I rewrote it, then lost it again.  That kind of bummed me out so I abandoned it, although the whole experience left me feeling a little burned out and it took time to get back the motivation I had previously had.

Then there was the formatting issues I had with the paperback for The Man Who Built the World.  I struggled with it for weeks before finally outsourcing it and paying someone else to do it for me, which I should have done in the first place.  The sum result was that I failed to get the paperback ready for Christmas, although it should be available shortly.

In other writing, I'm plot-knotted again in Tube Riders, although I'm working through it now.  My novella series, Beat Down, suffered from the flash drive failures and I had to rewrite roughly 5000 words on part three, something that was very frustrating because it is very creatively spontaneous and I think a bit of the humour was lost in the rewrite.

Overall, though, I'm pretty happy with what I've got over the last six months.  In addition, after reading a blog by a pretty successful writer which encouraged us to get as much product out there as possible because you never knew what would strike a chord with the reader, I went back and took a look at a really old novel, one called Possession, which I wrote when I was 19.  It's little more than a straightforward horror story and I have never so much as reread it, but I found it was a lot better than most of the stuff I've read by indie writers so with a couple of solid edits it might be serviceable.  So I've started to work on that as well as the edit for a book called Head of Words, which is a (very) black comedy/horror/thriller/thing.

Right, back to it.  Have a good Christmas everyone, and I'd be happy to see any comments below.  And just a reminder that Tube Riders is currently free, until the 22nd of Dec.  Click the links in the sidebar and grab a copy.

CW
21st Dec 2012