Milestones

Today is the 13th of March. It's the middle of the month, and like it or not, April is just around the corner. Oh, the spring list that is about to be unfurled! House cleaning (unless you've already started), gardening projects, BBQs, camping trips, fishing trips, vacations, explorations, and all of the things that come about when the sun starts actually warming the bones.

Me, I'm stuck inside this spring. Not that I begrudge the fact. But I've got a milestone to meet, which means my days are spent inside at the computer, writing. Which also means I need to get the AC unit for the living room repaired before the weather starts heating up.

I've got a lot of personal projects going on this summer. Along with the novel (everyone has to have one, right?), I've got 3 short stories planned, as well as 3 that are in circulation looking for a home. I've got 2 others that are (still) half-finished (they've been sitting for 4 months since I started getting busy with freelance work), and lots of outline work to do on the novel. This series will be 4-5 books, depending on the deal I can sign when I get to that point. I've got most of the outline done, and I should be clearing the 80k words mark by the end of March, which signifies the half-way point. I'm shooting for 160-180k. The outline calls for 180k, but I may cut a couple of chapters out, or I may extend it beyond that.

Most authors do 1-2k per day of writing in their novel. I don't always hit that marker. Some days I only get 500 words down, while others days I'll sit down and get a good 3k words in. I've had one week where I completed 2 chapters (around 13k worth of content) in 4 days, and other times when I've been lucky to get 2 chapters done in a month. I started the actual planning for this a few years ago, but didn't start writing it until November of 2008. I've basically done around 12-15k worth of content per months since then, which isn't as much as a full-time novelist, but then again I'm only working on this part-time at present. The rest of my time is spent freelancing and working on short stories so I can build up my resume before I get to the agent-shopping stage.

Being self employed has its downfalls. It's easy to fall into a routine of laziness. It took me almost 15 months to get over automatically waking up at 6 a.m. after 15 years of waking up at 5:30 and being in the truck by 6 to be at the job-site between 7 or 8. Now I generally wake up around 8 if I don't use an alarm. I spend an hour checking e-mails and waking up, then I do my workout and take a shower, which takes about an hour. After that it's breakfast, and I make blog posts and do a quick browse of the job boards and generally start work around 11 a.m. From then, I usually work until 2 or 3 p.m., dependant. Then I spend 1-2 hours submitting job query e-mails/searching the various boards for work-related postings, and then I work on my pet projects for 2-3 hours until Evy gets home from work/school.

But there are those days when you just want to lay in bed. After all, there isn't a boss screaming at you to be in your cubicle by 8 a.m., and there generally isn't a world-ending event that requires you to leap out of bed and scramble for your clothing in an effort to beat rush-hour traffic. It's hard to avoid those kind of days, but everyone enjoys them from time to time.

I think I'm going to take one tomorrow :) I'll pass the 70k words mark today in my novel, which means I only have 2 more chapters to do over the next 2 weeks until the end of the month, and I don't have any pressing deadlines atm, so it looks like smooth sailing for personal projects this month.