I had an excellent writing month in July. Final word count for the month was 25,353 and I got work done on both of my current large projects (The Perfect Daughter and All That Mattered). In addition, I finished all but the last little bit of the Fan Fiction Rewrites project; at this point, I’m close enough to done to call it “finished,” as the outstanding items require a good bit of reworking before I can post them.
Here’s the full list of everything I got posted in July:
- Bad Deal (Firefly), one of the fan fiction rewrites;
- The Dance (Star Trek: Voyager), a previously award-winning fic that has been rewritten twice at this point;
- Foolish (The Cutting Edge), another one of the fan fiction rewrites;
- A Few Surprises (Firefly), a rewritten vignette;
- Living for Herself (Firefly), another rewritten vignette;
- Local Attractions (Star Trek: Enterprise, rated M), which is one of the rewrites;
- A Need for Reality (Earth 2), yet another rewrite;
- Never But Maybe (Star Wars: Original Trilogy), which is a fan fiction rewrite, but I never finished the original. At this point I’ve posted the first several chapters and I’m planning to have all of those up by the end of August. Then, I’ll be writing the rest of them.
- Popcorn and Hot Chocolate (Star Trek: Voyager), one of only two fics I’ve written in first person;
- React, Distract, Act (Castle), rewritten to the same exact word count as the original;
- This Same Old Game (Scarecrow and Mrs. King), which was not a rewrite, but rather an additional chapter to the No Choice But Forward project. This one is an episode tag to “Utopia Now” from the third season;
- Triptych (Firefly), which began as a vignette but ended up becoming a bit longer; and
- Vulnerability (Star Trek: Voyager, rated MA), which I had written primarily to prove I could write explicit stories.
Somehow I got all this done despite the fact that I was only at home two out of the four weekends in July.
One of those weekends was a visit to see a friend in another state. However, from July 17-20, I was at an annual writing retreat with Michael and some of our mutual writer friends. This is the third time this group, which is scattered throughout the US and Australia, has gotten together in-person; and for this iteration, I decided to focus on The Perfect Daughter.
It worked; I got myself unstuck, and the word count, as of the end of July, was about 7,500 against a projected ending count of 21,000. Unfortunately, that landed me smack in the “muddy middle,” as it’s sometimes called, and progress since then has been pretty slow. It has not, however, been zero, so I’m taking that as a good sign and refusing to give up hope.
I also made some significant progress on the outlining for All That Mattered. I had gotten about two-thirds of the way through version 1 of the scene outline but had then lost the threads which I was braiding together, so I went ahead and started version 2. That’s now about halfway done, and I’ve identified a major structural flaw that needs addressing, meaning there will be a version 3 outline before I can start drafting. Better to find that out now, though!
The folks over at Two Squirrels Press have now given me a revised publication date for The Iron Rose: mid-September. Contracts have been signed and we’ve seen a preview of the cover art, so I’m hopeful about that too.
In other words, I have a lot to look forward to in August, including attendance at Dragon Con toward the very end of the month. The challenge will be maintaining my momentum. That will take work, but I have every reason to think I can do it!