Retreat to the House on the Hill V

Once again, I head the pleasure of attending the now annual Retreat to the House on the Hill. This was my fifth time attending the writing retreat, and incidentally the fifth time the retreat has been held--so I've been around since the beginning. It's a fantastic opportunity to get a ton of writing done, as well as get to know some other writers.

Dave Butler, author of the Witchy War series among many other books--and my touring teammate--continues to serve as gracious host of the retreat. I spent time with many other talented and awesome writers while there as well--and I'm particularly proud of the work I accomplished while there. For me, it went more or less like this:

Monday: Outlining Dawnrise, the fifth and final books of the Chaos Queen Quintet.

Tuesday: Finished the DR outline. (I'd hoped to be finished by the outline before the retreat, but alas, that did not happen. And, tbh, I'd started getting a bet down on myself on Tuesday because, while I was accomplishing a lot of work by finishing the outline, I wasn't getting tangible words written, and that bothered me. [To be clear, I don't think it should have bothered me--work is work, and writers get things done in all kinds of ways--but I find retreats are at their most useful for me at the drafting phase, where I can just churn out a lot of words. So, I was letting that get to me.]) But, once finished with the outline, I did start writing the Prologue of DR, getting a whole 255 words into it :-D.

Wednesday: Continued the first draft of DR in earnest, writing 8494 words.

Thursday: 9013 words farther into the DR draft.

Friday: 10066 words! It's a rare occasion that I get 10,000 plus words (I think I can count them on one hand), and this was one of those days. Killed it.

Saturday: 4206 words. This was more of a half day, but 4200 is still much better than my daily minimum goal (2k).

So, all things considered, I wrote just over 32,000 words for the week. That's more writing than I do in a month, sometimes, so I'm pretty happy about it. And, despite heavy outlining at the beginning of the week, I'm very happy I was able to dig into a decent word count total at the end. I think that puts me at just over 20% as far as my progress on Dawnrise goes, and that feels pretty good.

Oh, also I won the Edward M. Kovel award for "Best-coordinated loungewear on a Curmudgeon." That was the exact Kovel award I was gunning for, tbh, so I couldn't be happier there, either!

Short Story Progress

First of all:  I wrote 4k words today!  I think that's pretty cool, considering I'm composing a first draft (as opposed to revising).  My general goal for composition writing is 2k words/day, so doubling that feels pretty good.

This story's process has been interesting.  It's a short story that I'm planning on submitting to the Writer's of the Future contest for Q4, and my original word count goal for the story was 10k.  Well, I hit that today, but I'm still only about 2/3 done with the story; I think it'll be closer to 15k when all is said and done.  That's kinda pushing it for this contest.  Technically they accept stories up to 17k words in length; I don't think I'll go beyond that, but the longer a story is, the higher expectations are for that story.  There is more room to develop characters, expound settings, and complicate plot.  That's not to say that a novelette-length piece will inevitably trump a short story, but I do think expectations play a role, there.  So the more I write, the more I need to be absolutely sure that what I'm writing is top-notch stuff.

I'm not sure I've hit that point with this story yet.  I mean, I rarely feel like I have top-notch stuff in a first draft, but often I'll get a writerly gut feeling that what I'm writing has the potential for that kind of thing.  So, while there are some good ideas bouncing around in this particular story, I haven't fallen in love, yet.  Sometimes that happens in the beginning of the first draft for me, sometimes it happens when I'm reworking the ending on the third revision.  And, sure, sometimes it doesn't happen at all.  Either way, I'm definitely hoping I can get to that point with this story; I'm not sure I'll have a winning piece without that feeling.

I've also been outlining this story, which is different than what I've normally done, especially for short stories.  I'll have to tell you more about that process in a later post.  But, for now, I'm happy with what I've done today.