So January has come and gone. I would have done this the very last day of the month, but my German Shepherd, Aya, passed away a few days ago and I needed time to recover from the loss. Now the pain has dulled enough to let me get back on track with my New Year’s schedule.
I’m actually quite proud of myself. I made it through January and left off right where I should have. I reached 50k words on Rogue–putting me over 2/3 of the way through the rough draft. And I also completed revisions for Priestess Under Fire and got that sent out to test readers for their feedback. All things considered I wrote over 120k words in January–a feat I never would have imagined possible a year ago.
I did learn that I needed to allow for a bit more of recovery time. I was sick for four days (and of course, I lost Aya) which made catching up on both stories rather hard. So I’ll take that into consideration from now on while following the schedule.
That being said February is a short month. It’s just as well the next book in the Shield series (After ROGUE) is a novella centered around Saithe Ryan’s partner, Korbin Copeland, and his heroine, Crosslee. A novella is typically defined as anything less than 50k words but they normally run around 20k-30k in word count. It presents its own challenges since I haven’t tried my hand at writing a complete story in so few words.
I’ll also be finishing up Rogue’s rough draft. Then I plan on taking a few weeks off before starting its revisions. Once those are done it will be sent off to its own round of test readers. (Hopefully the process will repeat with each book as I get it finished.)
And, depending on what I hear from Priestess Under Fire’s test readers, I’ll have final touch ups to do on PUF before sending it out for publishers. My goal is to get PUF in the hands of readers this year. If mainstream publishing isn’t willing to accept it I have considered getting it out there myself, but I need to do research on where to start.
Anyway, that’s January’s report and February’s to do list in a nutshell. I hope everyone else is having an easier time keeping to their resolutions this year! (If you haven’t decided to just totally abandon them–which is okay too)
samanthablake 