A busy Saturday writing wise

My wife is the musical director of a local pantomime. Show week is next week. As a result she's been very busy for the past few days. This has meant me keeping out of her way so she can finish the arrangements of a few pieces and get some practice in. Or to put it another way I've had plenty of opportunity to write this week. I guess it was just as well that I had a new writing project to get on with.

Well it has been a productive day (and week). So far today I have written 3,856 words. It's been my most productive day of the year so far. Looking back at my writing diary (yes I'm sad enough to record this kind of thing) it's the best since the 21st December last year. That day my wife was away playing a gig so I was home alone. I do kind of try to do the bulk of my writing when she's not in.

So I have now been writing my new YA Supernatural story for eight days. It is currently at 16,056 words. Or to put it another way I am averaging more than 2,000 words a day. not a bad average. If I keep that rate up I'll have the first draft done in a month. Thinking back it probably helped having Friday afternoon off work and not having any workmen around. That was 1,928 unexpected words.

Of course it's not likely to stay at that kind of output. I need to spend more time doing submissions. Even given last night's efforts my bawdy sci-fi novel has only gone out 14 times. I need to find it several more potential homes. Someone told me the average success rate is something like 1 in 2000 for these submissions. Now I would like to think my fiction is a little above average in terms of quality (who wouldn't) when it comes to these speculative submissions.

Fortunately I don't think I'm deluding myself too much as one or two of the agents and publishers I've sent my work into have given me positive feedback and I've had seven requests for a full manuscript - even if one of them still resulted in a rejection and a couple of the others were so long ago I consider them both dead.

And on top of the submissions I still have the matter of the third Ben Williamson novella. That needs to be revised and then I will need to put together a synopsis and new covering letter and then start trying to find that one a home. All of which will eat into writing time. This would be a lot easier to manage time wise if I didn't need to have a day job to do all the boring stuff like pay the mortgage.

So I think it will take longer than my current average suggests.

That said though, this coming week is my wife's show week. She will be out tomorrow afternoon and evening at a technical rehearsal. Monday is dress rehearsal and Tuesday through Saturday is show time. I won't see much of her until next Sunday - and then she's likely to be asleep all day. She usually is once the adrenaline wears off.

Here's hoping I will make a lot of progress. Of course I am probably jinxing everything.

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