Numbers and Words

I'm hoping having a fancy spreadsheet with numbers will help me keep my writing quota. I'm a numbers person, and for some reason percentages are very motivating to me.

New Novel

I finished my first novel. It's done, and I probably won't go back to it for a while. I don't plan on submitting it, according to plan. I'm proud of it, and I think it did a lot of things really well, but there are a lot of holes, and a lot of things that I learned partway through that I didn't bother fixing because I wrote it as a learning experience.

Two things I learned:

1 - Don't write too many characters. At least for the type of novel I was writing, 3 main characters with over a dozen sidekicks was too many. Unfortunately, the nature of the book required all of the side characters, but the page length was too little. To give the concept justice I'd have to make it a 200,000 word epic fantasy novel. It could work, but not for my first novel.

2- My character development needs work. I think this is something I need to plan ahead - what my protagonist's flaw is, and how is overcomes it. I kind of had it in mind starting the novel, but the development really didn't come through in the writing. For this next novel, I'm going to try to hammer out the development better.

So, time to write a novel to submit. Actually I'm almost 16,000 words into it so far. Here's the work-in-progress summarization of what it's about:

"The Almost-Finished World, a 70,000 word YA steampunk/fantasy novel, set in an unfinished world, features Magnus Rivera, who is hired by a clandestine society to find the next ‘Brilliance’—a genius that emerges each century to introduce a life-changing innovation such as magic or steam power—before the year five-hundred, when the newest technology will be revealed and the planet completes its creation process."

I'm pretty excited about it.

I've also decided to change my writing quota system. Instead of having a daily word quota, I'm setting a weekly goal. That way if I miss day, I can make it up the next. For now, it's 3600 words per week. Which means I should be done writing in May. Honestly, I think I'll finish before then. 3600 words is fairly lax, and I should be able to exceed it a lot of weeks.

Current Progress:

The Almost-Finished World - 15,852/70,000 words