Overall, the year 2011 was a pretty good year for writing here at Casa Turovich. It was pretty good for several reasons including:
- I finally completed my first fiction novel, An Empire Forgotten, between March and July, all 110,700 words
- I made a good start on the second book of the trilogy, An Empire Embattled, during August to November, for an additional 30,100 words
- Wrote and self-published my first short story, The Missing Wizard, at 4500 words)
- Began work on two additional short stories (Storms on an Opal Sea, The Meeting (working title)
- Starting editing and rewriting book 1 to bring it up to snuff for eventual self-publishing
All-in-all, a pretty good year for writing fiction, considering that before this year I hadn’t gotten my act together and really strung the story together from start to finish. Lots of scene writing where I wrote exciting scenes for the book, or explored different viewpoints and ideas, but nothing from end to end.
So, since many other authors have been tooting their own wordage scores I just want to note that according to the above word count I managed over 150,200 words of written fiction material. Note this does not include the verbiage done for my technical writing day job, so the word count would be a bit higher if that was included, but not by much. This count also does not include the months of Jan-Feb where I was still futzing around with chapters 1-3 designs for book 1, nor the last couple of months where I basically have done very little writing at all for one reason or another.
A big reason for that was some big real life changes in my job status. The easy transition to a new company has not been as straightforward as expected and that has led to a bit of uncertainty and concern. That in turn gave me an excuse, a very bad excuse I know, to avoid working on my writing.
It also led me to pursue the possibility of purchasing a business somewhere and changing my career entirely, so lots of researching businesses in MO, MI, and AZ. Some queries have gone out and evaluations are underway. I may still go that way, but as always, big changes require some serious thoughts before a decision is made.
On the schedule for books 1 and 2, I am severely behind. All the mojo and drive that I had through out the year kind of pooped out at the end and I just couldn’t seem to motivate myself into sitting down and doing anything. I don’t believe in writers block as there is always something you can be doing on the current project, or working on a second project, or even starting something new. Every writer has more ideas than they could ever complete. There is always some way to channel your creative energy into motion that causes progress. Knowing that and doing it are two different things and I sometimes have a hard time kicking myself in the ass to make it happen. That was Nov-Dec in a nutshell. I was drifting and unwilling to get out of the rut I was in.
So, while 2011 was very productive, its time to get 2012 rolling as well. Have rewritten chapter 1 of book 1 and working to reduce the first few chapters into the bare essentials to speed up the entire start of the story. I need to get back into book 2 as well and am working on completing chapter 9 ASAP. In addition, have refined the new short story (The Meeting) to make it shorter and less rambling, now I just need to complete it. Also, gotta finish Storms as well and do the final edit to get it out.
So, lots to do, and once real life settles down a bit I hope to be able to concentrate more on my fiction.
