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Quarter 3 Update

Bright yellow flowers from my garden
A snapshot of my garden in July

Quarter 3 recap: 

July: I spent all of July continuing to clean and tweak Dandelions. In the round of revisions that continued from June, which mostly focused on the continuity of the world-building, I added 10 percent to the total word count. Then I did another pass focused on line edits, using my macro to flag all of my overused words and passive verbs. Once those passes were done, I shipped Dandelions out to betas. Outside of writing, July was more travel: to Wisconsin for a cousin's engagement party, to Chicago for my brother-in-law's surprise birthday party, back to Wisconsin for a family vacation. 

August: August was a month of rest. For the first half of the month I did no writing, instead focusing on finishing up some beta reads. I also did a ton of research for a new book idea. In the second half of the month, we went back to Wisconsin for another family vacation, and then for the week after I took a week off and relaxed: I hiked a local hiking path, wrote in a new coffee shop every day, binge-listened to Sarah Maclean's backlist while knitting, and finally checked out the local yarn store. During this week I also zero-drafted a new story. There's radioactive bears, characters I'm excited about, and also some themes that I'm really nervous about attempting to do justice to. Also, betas started to come back in a trickle throughout the month. 

September: The last month of the quarter was a whirlwind. I wish I could say that my week of total rest prepared me well for how busy September was, but unfortunately, that's not how rest works. Work exploded (in fun and challenging ways), and I ended up working 10-11 hour days most days for 3 weeks, including some weekend hours. Knowing it would end once we hit October helped...but not by much. At the same time, I dove into revisions for Dandelions, and spent 2 weeks ironing out some issues flagged by betas. Between revisions and writing, I spent most of September going non-stop from 5 am until 10pm. As a result, I catapulted myself right back to therapy! I'm lucky to have that support network and health insurance that covers those costs. More importantly, in September I wrote a synopsis that I'm happy with that fits on one page. That was truly my greatest accomplishment.  

Up next: I'm querying again! With the pacing epiphanies I made in July followed by some really lovely beta feedback, I feel like Dandelions is in a really solid place, and I'm really proud of it. I'm tempted to throw all my queries out into the world because I love it so much!! Instead, I'm doing my best to go slow, and give myself time to pivot if things aren't working. 

It's also October--so I'm slowly getting back into writing mode. I'm working on character sheets right now in an attempt to better understand the different ways that my characters in the new book with interact and push against each other. I'm hoping by mid-month to be back in my Plottr file, preparing a stronger outline for a true first draft of this book by the end of the year.  

Petal-less flowers, and a single yellow weed left
The same flowers at the end of the quarter, plus a pretty weed
2023 Goals: 

  1. Begin querying The Seaming -- Complete in Q1. Doubly complete, since I'm moving on to querying Dandelions. 
  2. Write, polish, and submit 6 short stories -- Removed. I did write one short story in January, but haven't written any since then. I was too consumed by Dandelions. At this point, this goal doesn't feel important anymore. 
  3. Draft one zero-draft -- Complete in Q3. I attempted to dredge up the old 20K in 5 days challenge to hit this goal, and wrote 11K, half in prose and half as a sloppy-zero draft. Despite the state of the book (bad!) I made it to the end of the story. I have a clear sense of direction on what I need to decide to be able to turn this mess into a solid story. 
  4. Be a better participant in my writing communities -- In progress. During Q3 I read 326,000 words of my friends' writing, for a year-to-date total of 768,000 words (again not counting critique group pieces). When I set this goal, I did not have a quantifiable measure for this goal. After seeing the way these numbers have stacked up, if I can read 4 more average-sized beta novels by the end of the year (which is reasonable), I could feasibly have beta'd 1 million words in the year. And I do love pretty numbers. 

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