Well September was a month, that’s for sure. I’m sure I’ve said this in the past, but I really need to stop booking things and setting ambitous goals in what is my civilian life’s busiest month. It felt like I was fighting a low-level cold most of the last two weeks of September, which I mostly managed to avoid having flare up into full on mucus kaiju.

So, how’d I do with September’s goals?

• Keep my short stories on submission
• Send out more novel queries to agents
• Edits on my new WiP: finish currrent draft and at least one more to boot
• Finish revising a short story I’ve been noodling with and send it out
• Attend Sask Expo and have fun (and sell some books, maybe?)

Not great, but I moved the yardsticks a bit on a few things. Something getting done is always better than nothing, and if I wasn’t writing these posts, there’s every chance I would’ve done nothing in September.

I didn’t send any short stories out in September. The way things shook down, the stories I had available didn’t have any markets remaining for them that were currently open to submissions. I do still have some stories still out on submission, and a couple that I’ve got rewrite requests for so hopefully those will work out.

More agent queries went out. Not much to say about that book yet. When there’s good news I’ll share more.

I finished the draft I’d been working on in August, and came close (ish) to finishing that next one. Have pretty much written all the scenes I’d identified as missing from my discovery draft and the manuscript is currently sitting around 66000 words. I’ve written the last chapter, and have three chapters near the end that are outlined as to the basic events but need to be written yet to go. Expecting an average of 3000 words per chapter, that should take me to 75K, and I want this book to land somewhere around 80-85K, so totally reachable with some worldbuilding fleshed out, and a few more character building scenes. I’ve been waiting on finishing these final chapters until everything else was done, and the plot was more or less sorted so I could draw on everything to make the emotional core work. This book has been written a bit more peacemeal than I’d like, but considerably less so than Too Far Gone was, and so far the revisions seem to be proceeding faster than my last WiP. (Knocks all the wood.)

Saskatoon Expo was good! I sold some books. Got to visit with my good friends Clare and Mike a whole bunch, and got to chat with friend and former coworker (and fellow Evil Dead fanatic) Ian, so that was a nice bit of business there. I also did a reading at the Celebrating Manitoba event for THIN AIR, which was a wonderful night. I read a bit from Too Far Gone, and got to say a tribute to Wayne Tefs, and read a bit from his work.

Looks like finishing the short story drew the short straw again. Novels are my focus, but I’ve got a lot of time and words tied up in those half finished stories, and I was really hoping more of them might’ve got out the door by this point in the year. I’m going to try and get the current story done for my next writing group meeting.

And the goals for October?

• Keep my short stories on submission
• Keep querying agents
• Prep for C4
• Finish revising a short story I’ve been noodling with and send it out
• Get my WiP ready for first readers

I think that’s too much. But I’m still gonna go for it.

Write on!