I’ve been a little down on myself lately for not having made more progress on Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained, the sequel to No Rest for the Wicked.
Then, I did some math.
Between the blog tours for Riftmaker and No Rest for the Wicked, that’s 40 guest posts and interviews since January. I also wrote some posts for CyCon and several pages of the website. I’ve refreshed and transferred old articles over to Steampunk Journal and edited guest posts. Some things were longer, some were shorter, but let’s say an average of 1000 words. I also had two freelance writing projects, which are about 8,000 words a piece, and one lecture about “Egyptomania” for the International Steampunk Symposium. I edited about 500 pages as a freelancer as well, which took up a lot of my time and brain energy when it came to words, so let’s throw that into the mix as well.
Which means since January I have written about 65,000 words and edited over 135,000 words of nonfiction for a total of 200,000 words. That is the equivalent of writing and revising an entire novel. No wonder I haven’t been working on fiction yet in 2019!
The good news is I’m back in the saddle again. Just a handful of posts left to go in the No Rest for the Wicked tour, and I started revising Act 1 of NVNG over the weekend. With CyCon coming to a close in about a week, my schedule is going to open up even more. Plus, The Mister will be back in the field again this summer, leaving me to my own devices for most of the summer. I’m declaring June and July a “Writing Bootcamp”, and I am really looking forward to it! Looking back on averaging 50,000 words worth of work per month for the past four months tells me I’m going to get a LOT of work done and make up for what felt like lost time.
They say the best way to stick to a goal is to tell someone else, so here’s the goal: Finish a full draft of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained by the end of June. Which means later this summer I am going to need some beta readers! I’ll be opening up the opportunity to my email subscribers and Facebook fan group, so if you’d like a chance to get a sneak peek of the sequel to No Rest for the Wicked, make sure you’re part of one of those groups.
Phoebe Darqueling 
Don’t know if my comment went through but just wanted to say you are rocking it. Our other work often doesn’t feel like enough but this is quite the accomplishment! Be proud and keep the words flowing. If you’d like an accountability writing partner let me know. I need to stop procrastinating and set some goals and deadlines to meet. Anyway great job and keep going!
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