2017 Writing Goals - March Update

Flowers in Portsmouth, NH.

1. Finish Moon Murder – The last of the pre-written work is with the crit group right now. I’m going to wait for their feedback, then write an outline, then start writing fresh words. My goal is 4K words a week. It sounds ambitious, but it should be doable, only 572 words a day every week. Alternatively that’s a little more than 1000 words for every day I’m not working. Considering I have written 1667 words every single day of November this should be a cake walk.
   1. If I keep up that pace a number of goals should happily converge. First I’ll be able to submit 4k words to my crit group every week. Second I should have a total of 80,000words by the end of June (including a week for writing the outline and a week off for vacation). This means that I can take a month and a half to edit before sending the novel to beta readers at the end of August, right before I go to London. I’ll get back and have almost a solid month to apply those edits before sending the novel to an agent.
2. NNWM – Still doing research for the novel and fleshing out the plot a bit. Character sketches soon!
3. Write and submit 12 short stories – I wrote, edited, and submitted a new short story in January. For February I did a *major* revision of and old short story that had been lost in the weeds. I think it’s doing a lot better now. I have a couple people looking at it, and after another round of, hopefully, light revisions I’ll be sending it out as my February submission.
4. Critique Group – I submitted twice this month on purpose. One because I took a week of vacation and two because the whole group needed some time to catch up and otherwise recover from life happening. The first week of this month is the majorly revised short story mentioned above. After that is a week off for the outline. Then there should be consistent submissions of fresh words from now until June.
5. Author Visibility – Going reasonably. I posted three times on Instagram and have generally been good about FB and Twitter. I’d like to post more original blog posts, not just 8 Sentence Sunday posts.

How have your writing goals been going?