My writing goal for the year Apr 2003 - Apr 2004 was to have written 50,000 words of the current novel and to have completed and submitted 4 short stories to publishers. What I actually managed was 34,000 words of the novel and 1 short story completed and submitted. Not too bad, I suppose.
So my writing goal for the year Apr 2004 - Apr 2005 is to finish the first draft of the novel (i.e. write the remaining 66,000 words) and to finish and submit 2 short stories.
I'm hoping that the second part of the novel will be easier to write than the first part because most of the planning and character creation is done, so it's just a case of getting down to the writing.
In order to encourage me to keep the word count rising, I'm putting a pie chart of the number of words written here as a visual reminder of what I've done and how much more there is still to do.
In addition, to help me keep up my recent burst of productivity, I have created another graph showing the rate of growth of the MS. The black trend line shows the overall rate of progress, the newly added red line shows predicted progress if I can keep writing at my present rate.
The novel that I'm working on is a comic fantasy, a sort of magical situation comedy and it's allowing me to draw on real life experience far more than one might expect. It's the tale of a young couple who move to the countryside to take over as wardens of a pilgrim hostel at the foot of a magic mountain and what happens when the expected dream job doesn't turn out quite as promised. They are faced with a number of problems: the previous warden is still haunting the place; the source of the village's livelihood is under threat and the stove seems to have a personality of its own. Being a comedy, it all works out in the end and they all live happily -- at least until the start of the sequel...
