This year I’m participating for the first time in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which runs from June 23 through August 2. The goal of the Write-a-thon is to raise awareness of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, along with money that will go toward funding next year’s workshop. Participating writers set their own writing goals and strive to meet them; supporters provide moral support and a donation if they can. If you’d like to donate, please visit my participant page.

Writing Goal 1: add 20,000 words to the “The Red: Trials,” my novel-in-progress. DONE!

Writing Goal 2: Have two (one remaining) short stories in solid draft. Short is a keyword. Novelettes don’t count.

Week 5 Result
(Disclaimer: I’m composing this a day early, on Friday, since I’ll be away over the weekend.)

Five weeks in, and one week to go!

This was a tough week, with a lot of hours spent in front of the computer. Many of those hours were frustrating and unproductive, but on most days, by late afternoon, I had a decent word count.

Goal 1:
To my surprise I not only completed Goal 1 this week, I roared right past it. I’ve added 23,000 words to the manuscript since the start of the write-a-thon, with 8600+ over the past week.

Goal 2:
As of late Friday afternoon, I have done no work on my second short story. I’ve got eight days left to produce a draft. I’m not confident, but I’m going to give it a shot.

This year I’m participating for the first time in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which runs from June 23 through August 2. The goal of the Write-a-thon is to raise awareness of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, along with money that will go toward funding next year’s workshop. Participating writers set their own writing goals and strive to meet them; supporters provide moral support and a donation if they can. If you’d like to donate, please visit my participant page.

Writing Goal 1: add 20,000 words to the “The Red: Trials,” my novel-in-progress.

Writing Goal 2: Have two (one remaining) short stories in solid draft. Short is a keyword. Novelettes don’t count.

Week 4 Result
Four weeks in, and progress has slowed to a crawl. I have one small excuse. A couple days were devoted to revising a short story, which subsequently sold to Lightspeed Magazine. But mostly, I’ve been trying to get the novel moving, with mixed success.

Goal 1:
Very limited progress this week in actual word count. Being very generous with myself by counting a section which is almost entirely dialog at the moment, without any scene or mood-setting, I have now added 14,733 words out of my 20,000 word goal.That’s 74% with two weeks left, so there’s still a realistic chance I’ll make it. Despite the paltry increase in word count since last week, I made real progress on the novel by replotting. I figured out how to do without a whole, long tedious section, and move on almost directly into action–and that’s always a good thing.

Goal 2:
The best I can say is, I thought briefly about a story that I need to write, but I got nowhere with it. Drafting another short story in the time remaining is starting to feel very intimidating. It’s not going to happen if I don’t make it a priority. Hopefully I’ll have better news to report next week.

This year I’m participating for the first time in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which runs from June 23 through August 2. The goal of the Write-a-thon is to raise awareness of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, along with money that will go toward funding next year’s workshop. Participating writers set their own writing goals and strive to meet them; supporters provide moral support and a donation if they can. If you’d like to donate, please visit my participant page.

Writing Goal 1: add 20,000 words to the “The Red: Trials,” my novel-in-progress.

Writing Goal 2: Have two (one remaining) short stories in solid draft. Short is a keyword. Novelettes don’t count.

Week 3 Result
Nothing to brag about this week. There is a persistent “romantic” myth that the best art is made by suffering artists. In my own experience and in discussion with others I’ve found this to be utterly untrue. For myself, when confidence flags, so does my work, both in quality and quantity. This was not a week filled with confidence, and my productivity reflects that. So it goes.

Goal 1:
The bright point this week was that after quite a bit of struggle, a scene took an unexpected turn giving me fresh insight on what-is-going-on. In other words, a minor breakthrough. Even so, my feeling as I sat down to write this progress post was that I had added very little to the manuscript. As it turns out, my progress was better than I thought. I have now added 13,640 words to the manuscript out of my 20,000 word goal. That’s 68%, and time-wise I’m at the halfway point, so there is still hope.

Goal 2:
Nothing accomplished here! I was determined to make progress on the novel before tackling a new short story…and I got stuck on the novel. I’ll try to do better in Week 4.

This year I’m participating for the first time in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which runs from June 23 through August 2. The goal of the Write-a-thon is to raise awareness of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, along with money that will go toward funding next year’s workshop. Participating writers set their own writing goals and strive to meet them; supporters provide moral support and a donation if they can. If you’d like to donate, please visit my participant page.

Writing Goal 1: add 20,000 words to the “The Red: Trials,” my novel-in-progress.

Writing Goal 2: Have two (one remaining) short stories in solid draft. Short is a keyword. Novelettes don’t count.

Week 2 Result
Way back in May I wrote a novelette, which I then ignored for all of June and into July, but on July 4th — perhaps because I had just sent a story off to market and felt inspired — I started working on the revision. My goal was to cut it from 9900 words to 8000 words, and after working on it for all of July 4th and most of July 5th, I managed to do that, ending up with a much stronger story. But none of this effort counts toward my Clarion goals!

So…

Goal 1: This was an odd but ultimately successful week for the novel. From Sunday through Wednesday I did several brainstorming sessions, blocking out much of the action and dialog in an extremely rough and nonlinear form. Then on Friday evening and for most of Saturday I worked on making those scattered pieces coherent. The end result? I have now added 9,135 words to the manuscript out of my 20,000 word goal. 46% in two weeks, which is an excellent pace for me.

Goal 2: I spent time brainstorming a short story which may be the second short story I do for the write-a-thon. But I also blocked out the basics of a project that will likely be a novella, and which I’m very excited about — but that project will have to wait until after the write-a-thon.

This year I’m participating for the first time in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which runs from June 23 through August 2. The goal of the Write-a-thon is to raise awareness of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, along with money that will go toward funding next year’s workshop. Participating writers set their own writing goals and strive to meet them; supporters provide moral support and a donation if they can. If you’d like to donate, please visit my participant page.

Writing Goal 1: add 20,000 words to the “The Red: Trials,” my novel-in-progress.

Writing Goal 2: Have two short stories in solid draft. Short is a keyword. Novelettes don’t count.

Week 1 Result
On June 22, one day before the official start of the write-a-thon, I finished the draft of a short story. I’m bending the rules a bit, and calling that the first of the two short stories, so I’m already 50% of the way to Goal 2! Wednesday and Thursday mostly went toward polishing this story. I’m going to have one more reader look at it, but hope to send it to market Monday or Tuesday.

And the novel? Well…on June 17 I finished the first major section of the story, and then realized my outline was wildly out of date, and that I had only the fuzziest idea of what would happen next. So progress stopped while I considered everything, and contemplated, and brainstormed, and worked on other projects. That process continued through most of this past week. Then on Friday I put together a new style of outline for the next two sections of the book. This clarified things, and I was suddenly able to start writing again. Friday and Saturday combined produced 3600 new (albeit rough) words, 18% of my goal.

I have a strong suspicion I’ll be cutting a lot of wordage out of this section on second draft. This is rare for me. I tend to underwrite the first draft, not overwrite. But for now the object is to get a complete first draft, so…onward!

The number of SFF writers who’ve attended a Clarion Writers Workshop is really amazing. Sometimes it seems like “everyone” has…except of course that everyone hasn’t. Me, for example. By the time my writing reached the point where I might have qualified for Clarion, I was the mother of two young children, and there was no way I was going to leave them for six weeks–even if there had been enough money for it, which there wasn’t.

So in my mind Clarion has always been one of those things that other people do, like going to Europe, or living in a city with a literary community or something—definitely an advantage to a writing career, but not a necessity. Somehow I’ve managed without it…or have I? Maybe this has always been the missing ingredient! 🙂

At any rate, this summer I’ve decided to participate if only in an auxiliary fashion, by joining the Clarion West Write-a-thon. The goal of the Write-a-thon is to raise awareness, along with money that will go toward funding next year’s workshop. If you’d like to donate, please visit my participant page. My big goal is to force myself to stop squandering time online and instead spend more focused time writing.

I’ll be reporting on my success both here and on my participant page***. Wish me luck!

And find a list of all participants at the bottom of this page.

*** Update: I don’t think there’s a way to report progress on the participant page, so I’ll just do it here.