August Progress Report and September Goals (2016)

Last month I decided to do a post sharing my writing accomplishments for the last thirty days as well as listing my goals for the coming month. As August comes to a close, I decided to do it again.

I think it’s a good practice to occasionally review your progress toward your end goal, and also to set new goals and take a fresh look at things. Some people might do this every week; others every year. Whatever works for you is best, but I’ve always found that looking at my writing stuff on a monthly basis works best for me.

So with that out of the way, here’s a quickie progress report for August.

WIP Novel

I don’t have a lot new to report on my next novel. I’m still just working through the next revision. I once saw a quote on Twitter that went like this:

Editing a book is just like riding a bicycle
Only the bike is on fire
And you are on fire
Everything is on fire
And you’re in hell.

Sorry, I don’t know who to credit for that, but if you do, let me know and I’ll properly attribute. Anyhow, I certainly felt like that at times as I work through things. It seem like for every mistake I fix, I find two more. Still, things are coming together fairly nicely, even though I’m rapidly running out of time to finish the current revision (more on that in a bit…)

Short Stories

While I haven’t been writing anything new on this front as I work on the novel, I have been continuing to submit both unpublished and previously published short stories to a variety of places. I had some good news, as my silly sci-fi flash piece “Waking up in the woods” has been picked up and is scheduled to be reprinted both online and in audio in January of next year.

As for other short story stuff, here are my submission stats for the month:

Number of submissions: 7
Number of rejections: 4 (2 personal, 1 form, 1 rewrite request)
Number of acceptances: 1
Number still pending: 11, with one shortlist

Theme of Absence

Traffic at Theme of Absence has remained steady. We published four new stories in August. Just like last month, I received thirteen submissions. Tim and Betty have continued to contribute awesome original art for the site and I’m grateful to have such talented people associated with the site. (On a side note, I could still use 2 or 3 more artists, so if you’d be willing, drop me a line.)

The biggest news with Theme of Absence is that I’ll be reopening the Theme of Absence Halloween Horror Flash Fiction Contest again this year. We’re looking for flash fiction, with a 1000-word max. This is a semi-pro pay contest, with a prize of $.01/word. Check it out.

Goals for September

The most important thing in September (besides wedding anniversary 🙂 ) is the RMFW Colorado Gold conference, which takes place in just over a week. Part of the price of admission to the conference is a pitch session with an agent or publisher. This is again why I’ve been spending the majority of my writing time working on the novel. You can’t pitch a novel if it’s not as ready as you can make it.

In addition to having the novel “ready” I’ll need to polish the synopsis and query letter, just in case the pitch is successful. Wish me luck!

As for the second half of the month, I’ll take a few weeks away from the novel and maybe work on some short stories of my own and start reading the Theme of Absence Halloween submissions.

Should be a fun month. I hope yours is as well!