Jay Lake (jaylake) wrote,
Jay Lake
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[personal|process] Year End Summary

Happy New Year, all. (At least if you're Gregorian.) Here's my obligatory year-end summary.

This year in my writing related program activities (ie, excluding day job output, which is substantial) I have written about:

104,000 words of first draft novel
345,000 words of LiveJournal entries
10,000 words of nonfiction, reviews, articles, etc.
90,700 words of first draft short fiction

That's 549,000 words of new material in 2007. I still have no idea how to account for revisions, and email is still copious but irrelevant. To break it out a bit more:

Written in 2007

21 short stories a 90,700 words

1 partial novel (Green) at 104,000 words

About 10,000 words of published nonfiction, mostly with specficrider

About 345,000 words of blogging here on LiveJournal.

Rewriters, copy edits and final galley edits on Escapement

Final galley edits on the Mainspring Powell's | Amazon | Audible ] mass market paperback edition

Publishing stats in 2007

Mainspring Powell's | Amazon | Audible ] in hardback, book club and audio editions, as well as Czech rights

The River Knows Its Own Wheatland Press | Amazon ] in trade paperback

About 20 short story appearances, plus several Year's Best and reprint anthos

Sold 24 short stories and 7 reprints

46 short story rejections




So what does it mean? Well, in 2006 I wrote a hell of lot more novel, and somewhat less short story. Nonfiction output is down as well. LiveJournal, on the other hand, is up quite a bit. Somehow this doesn't seem like a good thing.

Some of this is the shift to the New Model Process. I went essentially dark from the spring to the fall, right through the summer, except for a few short stories and my continued presence here online. That wasn't angst, it was transition. I knew it at the time, so it didn't alarm me too much.

I doubt I'll be back at the 2006 peak word counts again. I write slower and more thoughtfully, and will probably continue to slow down as I work at it. This is mostly a problem for my own self-evaluation process, but I'm beating myself into submission. And even with the issues, it's not a writing year to be anything but proud of.

I'd like to produce at least two first draft novels a year. (I did not even produce one complete first draft in 2007.) I'd like to produce them with enough lead time for the steeping aspect of the New Model Process to really be effective. Short fiction is still a great pleasure of mine, but I think I just need to be very relaxed about my numbers there, given that I'm committed to doing novels.

Once, I thought that if I did it fast enough I could do it all. Now, I want to do it well, at whatever pace that takes.
Tags: books, escapement, green, lj, mainspring, personal, process, river, stories, writing
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