Weekly Writing Update

Week of 01 January to 07 January

…Oops. I didn’t intend to take a two-week hiatus from these weekly writing updates around the holidays, but busyness happened, and so you were left hanging without me telling you what book reviews to expect or that I managed to finish my various projects on time for the end of the year. Hopefully you aren’t too upset, and perhaps you even enjoyed not having me show up in your inbox on a holiday, and I’m sure by now you’ve figured out that we did, in fact, manage to release the final Blood Magic episode on time, and that I submitted a short story I’m calling The Arch, the Centering, and the Keystone to December’s Elegant Literature contest. With that, let’s stop looking back at 2022 – we’ll do that enough in an upcoming Blood Magic reflection post – and instead look back at the first week of 2023.

With Blood Magic finished, I am moving onto a new project. The official announcement, in which I provide all kinds of detail about contents and timelines and so forth, will come near the end of January, but I’m not waiting until then to start writing. When I wasn’t writing a research paper for work, or building a presentation on the basics of astronautics for a seminar I may host in the near future, I jumped right into working on Impressions, the novel-length project to which I intend to dedicate most of my 2023 writing time. After I wrote a five hundred word, very vague summary to serve as a guide, I started on chapter 1 – there is always something thrilling, I find, about opening a blank document and writing that first chapter heading – and I have to say that it’s going well so far.

Well enough that I already finished chapter one and started on chapter two. My base goal is to write at least two chapters a month, although I hope to eke out three more often than not. With respect to wordcount, I aim for chapters to be between three and five thousand words (the first chapter came in at about 3600), so maintaining that pace would put me at a slightly lower total word count than when I was doing Blood Magic. That’s okay, though, because writing a novel is a different kind of writing.

Plus, I intend to devote a slightly higher proportion of my writing time to short stories. Elegant Literature‘s monthly contests are a great motivator to force me to practice brevity in my storytelling (if you didn’t already see, my submission for November’s “Worldbuilders” contest, In My Defense, received an honorable mention, and I may shop the story around to a few other publications – watch for updates in future weekly update posts); in fact, I already began a submission for January’s contest, although at the moment I’m only pleased with the first third. Beyond those contests, I know I said it last year, but I really do intend to complete Rogue Star and Necrosurgeon this year (ideally before June). Now that I’m actually submitting my work beyond just publishing it here on IGC Publishing, I have a little more motivation to craft some high quality short stories.

I also caught up on my backlog of book reviews (I think I had five or six that I needed to write), so overall the first week of 2023 was a satisfactory writing week. Ideally, I’ll finish chapter two and start on chapter three of Impressions next week, plus finish the rough draft for that January contest story. While I’m doing that, you’ll be able to read a post about news, and a review for Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad. That’s all from me for now, but I’ll be back next week (no, really, this time) with another weekly writing update.