I thought I’d end 2013 with a quick look at the year’s progress, from a production standpoint.

I  worked on a lot of projects. Though I’d have more ‘completed’ work if I were more focussed,  I don’t regret having been a bit more scattershot. Having a bunch of projects means when I get up early to write, there’s always something I’m excited to work on. Sometimes starting from scratch on something else is a writer’s block killer. The word counts below are for the most part ‘finished’ word counts (but really,  a work is never finished until it’s mass-etched on a book’s pages).

Written in 2013

Short Stories

8,682 – The Poet Retreats (submission in progress)

4,156 – The Colts (to be published in The Long Hidden in 2014)

6,171 – From the Sky (submission in progress)

6,462 – story about Queen Dowager Isabella Jagiellon, unfinished, abandoned (haven’t decided whether I’ll pick this back up)

2,463 – story about a…uh… bus ride, presently in-progress !

 

Novels:

~30,000 – Sherwood Nation ( rough count, since this went through a large condensing process along with a lot of new threads– current word count of the book is 159,161). To be published in 2014!

22,703 – The Voyage, co-written with David Naimon

22,723 – A futuristic book about dump-dwellers

Poems:

Weird! I wrote four poems in 2013 (something I haven’t done for a decade). That said, they’re all candidates to be inserted in the last book listed above, written by one of the characters therein.

Total word count: 103,360

~3.5 short stories, one completed novel, two novels in-progress.

I’m pretty happy with progress this year. I’d be totally content if this time next year I had the same tallies.

My goal is to publish a book every three years or so. By the time Sherwood Nation comes out, it’ll be six years between books. There were a lot of reasons for that absence (children, starting companies, the size of S.N.), but with the amount of work in the hopper at the moment, I can’t imagine a lapse between books that long again. See you in 2014, yo.