The Week of September 14th

I’ve been working on a new story this week and I’ve been revising the story I had workshopped a week ago. I also had my first meeting with my thesis advisor to talk about my novel, and so I’ve been making notes and organizing my thoughts on where I’m going to go for the next revision of that. As a result of all these other quite fruitful writing activities, I hardly got anything done on the new novel this past week and I didn’t send out any submissions, either.

I’m meeting again with my thesis advisor this next week and then I’ve got another member of my thesis committee reading the draft and once he’s done he’ll give me feedback, so I’m getting really excited again about working on my thesis and of course that’s really what I should be working on, instead of the new novel. So I’m going to have to decide, as this month draws to a close, how much work I want to keep putting into the new novel and whether I might just go ahead and stop setting goals for it so I can focus completely on getting my thesis together by its due date next semester.

I haven’t been doing a very good job, recently, of choosing what projects to work on right now and which ones to jot down in a notebook for the future. Right now I’m going back and forth between my thesis, my new novel, a collection of short stories I’m trying to put together, and two different children’s chapter books. It’s important to be writing, and for me, it’s useful to have a few different burners going so if I just don’t feel like working on one thing, there’s still something for me to do. But I think you do have to limit yourself because if you just sort of dabble in too many different projects, you’re not giving enough attention to any one of them and they all end up suffering.

Damien mentioned to me recently that he feels a little nervous that, as I’m working on the new novel, I’ll just stop working altogether on the old one and never actually finish (that is, revise, revise, revise until you just can’t revise any more) any book length work. And I think it’s a valid concern. So I’m going to be doing some serious thinking the next several days about what goals I want to set for next month, which projects I should really be focusing on right now and which ones I should wait and work on when I finish with something now.

For the month:

1. 9096 out 15,000 words on the new novel (45,591 total)
2. 1 out of 10 submissions