October Progress Report and November Goals (2016)

Happy Halloween!

And happy final day of October. I’ll say this has been a pretty good month. (Ignoring the ongoing thing about my house caving in upon itself.) In the world of non-writing stuff, we took the kids to a bunch of Halloween things and they’re totally ready to fill up those bags of candy tonight.

As for the writing stuff, the biggest highlight of October was this year’s Nebraska Writers Guild Fall Conference. Like I said in a previous post, it was another great conference. I made a few more writing friends and am looking forward to working more with the Guild in the future. I see so much potential growth both for the Guild and for all of the writers involved in it.

In honor of today being Halloween, you should click on over to Theme of Absence and check out the winning entry of our annual Halloween Horror Flash Fiction Contest, The Girl in the Window written by Michael J.P. Whitmer, with cover art by Tim Bougger.

And now onto other stuff…

WIP Novel(s)

Writing got a little easier for me when I finally gave in to peer pressure and decided to give Scrivener an honest look. And do I ever love it. I can already see so much progress in the planning of the new novel and the clean up of the existing WIP. I don’t really have a lot to report, other than I’ve mostly been working on the YA horror novel. It’s always awesome to see progress, though, and things are really coming together.

Short Stories

Much like most months this year, I haven’t been working on too many short stories. I’m still resubmitting unpublished and out-of-print stories, hoping to find them homes. Here are my submission stats for the month…

• Number of submissions: 2
• Number of rejections: 3 (1 form, 2 non-responses)
• Number of acceptances: 0
• Number still pending: 7, with one shortlist

Theme of Absence

In addition to the Halloween contest, it’s been a pretty good month for the site. We published four great stories and a couple of interviews. Traffic is up around 20%, mostly due to the Halloween contest. I received 22 regular site submissions and over a dozen Halloween submissions, so it has kept me busy. But in a good way 🙂

Goals for November

I know a lot of writers out there will be waiting by their computers at midnight to start getting those words written for NaNoWriMo. I personally don’t see a benefit for me this year, as I’m already working on a novel and don’t have the need to rush through and add 50,000 words to it. That doesn’t mean I won’t consider it again next year, though.

If you are going for NaNoWriMo this year, don’t forget to check out or NaNoWriMo podcast from earlier this month for some tips and inspiration.

As for my other writing goals, I would like to make major progress on the YA horror novel this month. My hope is to finish the first draft by the end of the year. We’ll see how that goes.

Really, working on the novel is my only real goal for the month. Well, that and all of the normal stuff I do with this site, the podcast, and Theme of Absence.

Finally I wanted to share that I’ll be signing books and anthologies at Columbus Public Library author fair on November 12. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi. It looks to be like a great event and I hope to see some of you guys there.

So that’s it. I hope you had a great October and wish you a successful November. Have a super Happy Halloween, stay safe, and watch as many scary movies as you can handle.

What goals have you set for November? Are you planning to participate in NaNoWriMo? Leave a comment and let us know!