Fiction-writing progress, 2012, week 6

This was a good week of writing. For the first time this year, I wrote for six consecutive days and wrote at last 500 words each of those days. I’d love it if I could continue at this pace. I wrote a total of 5,465 words this week which amounts to an average of 760 words/day. I’m more pleased that I wrote 6 out of 7 days than the actual amount of writing, however. It has been my goal all year to be able to consistently write 500 words a day, every day.

Part of the reason for the good week is the story that I’ve been working on, the epic fantasy short story. As of yesterday, the story was more than halfway done and something over 5,000 words long. I’m really pleased with the story. The story will require significant work in the second draft–including some painful cutting. That said, it has been a lot of fun and I think I’m telling a fairly original story. Of course, that’s difficult to know given my limited experience with the genre. I’m going to require some extra help from my early readers, I think.

The epic fantasy is the 5th story I’ve started this year. I’ve completed 2 stories and there are still two stories that remain unfinished. For those interested in what this might look like graphically, here is a chart of my progress for the first 6 weeks of 2012:

The purple shading is my pace. the blue shading represents days in which I was ahead of pace. The orange shading is where I was behind pace. I’ve added some annotations for where I started (and finished, in some cases) the first drafts of the stories I’ve worked on this year so far. As you can see, at the moment, I am ahead of pace by almost 2 days (nearly 1,000 words). For the year-to-date, I’ve written a total of 21,860 words of new, first draft fiction.

I’d like to get the first draft of story #5 finished this week, and get the third draft of story #1 completed as well. Story #2 is still out for submission, my second submission of 2012. I’m building up steam with all of these stories and I expect by the end of March or April, I’ll start of have a number of stories in the submission pipeline for the rest of the year.