September Post-Mortem and October Goals

Every month is like an event – you set and reach your goals (mostly), you get acceptances and rejections (ok, mostly rejections. Almost exclusively rejections. It’ll be a small party!), and you hope to find a sponsor or two along the way (meals are sponsorships, right?)

At the end of each month, I look back and see how much I’ve accomplished with my writing and telling, if I’m where I wanted to be at the end of the month, and if not, then why not?

For September, I had planned to:

• Write 15,000 words of Warrior of Darkness
• Write and send 2 short stories
• Send off Bergamont’s Journey (a story of about 17,500 words – will make chart soon of all stories...)

Did I meet my goals? Alas, no. I did meet my short stories goal, and Bergamont is ready to be mailed today, but I missed my target for Warrior of Darkness. The problem was that, at the beginning of the month, I received my tenth rejection for Destiny’s Blood. I’m pretty fussy over my writing, and this is the first of my manuscripts I actually believe might get published.

But there were still a few plot points and character traits I wasn’t sold on. I had sent it out into the world because, well, I really needed to wean that manuscript. So when it came back, I decided to sit down and re-visit those problem spots. It took a lot of work, but it was worth it. I still managed to write 5,000 words of Warrior of Darkness, so that’s not too bad. Still, next month, I’ll try to hit my goals.

Speaking of which, here are my October goals:

• Finish language edits on Destiny’s Blood and re-read to make sure I make sense
• Write 5,000 words of Warrior of Darkness
  
• Send off one short story
• Write two ghost stories for October 23 telling

We’ll see how it goes!