What’s Going On? - Why The Blog Updates Seem to be Slowing Down
“I said hey, what’s going on?”
This was mandatory the second I invoked the song.
Hey there, readers. Welcome to a post I’ve been toying around with in my head for about two weeks now. I’m both excited and remiss to have to write it, so we’ll see how it comes out, but basically I want to cover why the blog seems to be slowing down as of late. It’s a good news, bad news situation, so let’s just rip off some bandaids so we can apply some more bandaids.
The good news is that well, gosh darnit, I’m writing again. Like really writing again. In the past two weeks, I’ve written more than the past few months combined, not counting this blog. So in a way, one of the main aims of the blog has been somewhat achieved. Writing those silly little articles has jumpstarted the writing muscle in me and I’m turning it back toward my fiction for the first time in forever.
The bad news is that well, gosh darnit, I’m writing again. Like really writing again. And that sort of means having to prioritize where I put my energy. Unfortunately, it’s bad news Recursive Thoughts, as I’d rather put what little spare energy in my day toward what fulfills me and right now, that’s the fiction.
If we followed the metaphor, I just applied a bunch of bandaids only to rip them all off again, so I apologize, let’s get to putting some more bandaids back on.
What I want to do is somewhat silly. I want to give you all progress reports of what I’m writing. To do that, we need to quantify some things, and that feels both daunting and maybe helpful? You’ll get it as soon as we start, but to outline it in brief, we’re going to discuss the little writing projects I am currently working on (all of them), where they are now, and where they are in the grand scheme of being “done.” I’ll be using initials for their names so as not to give up the game, but I’ll describe what they are as far as form and genre.
That’s the aim, anyway, we’ll see if I’m too discouraged by hard numbers to follow through.
Works in Progress
Let’s do this as a good ole bulleted list. I love a good bulleted list. It makes me feel so organized. And it’s like a numbered list without the pressure of having to play favorites!
Projects:
G.J. - A Soft Sci-Fi Adventure Novel
A.F. - A Soft Horror Adventure Novel
D.o.L.G. - A Short Story Collection of All the Works I Did in College
N.O.K.W.Y.D. - A Poetry Chapbook Inspired by My Real Life Job
A Criminal’s Predestined Boulder - A Collection of all the Poetry I Did in College
I gave you the full title of that last one because it’s a stand-in title for a project that hasn’t really gone anywhere in years, but I do so love the name.
So, these are the works in progress that I am currently undertaking. Why so many projects? Wouldn’t it be easier to complete some of them if there were fewer of them? Well, dear reader, I guess. I’m not really sure. I haven’t really ever completed anything other than a short story and those are, well, short.
Something I’ve done my entire life, though, has been to avoid writer’s block. I do this, in theory, by never actually stopping the writing. I simply jump to another project, reread up to where I left off, and keep going. If you hit a wall in one project, you pivot to the next and so on until the writing starts again. This blog is an extension of that theory.
I know some people swear by this method and perhaps this may benefit me as well, but so far into this whole getting back into writing thing, I’ve been mainlining one project in particular and that’s the first one on that list, G.J. I’ve been thinking about it nonstop. It’s been refreshing, if not a little distracting to my homelife where I have a newborn daughter who needs looking after and a wife who needs to be relieved from looking after said daughter.
I would love to tell you more about them, but there’s a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to writing and talking about the projects you are writing instead of writing the dang projects. I don’t want to be one of those people who is always talking about their projects instead of finishing them (yet, here I am writing about my projects instead of writing them).
Measuring Progress
So, how are we going to measure progress anyway? Isn’t a novel sort of in progress until it’s done with no real markers as to how done it is? I don’t know. Again, I’ve never finished a novel. The closest I’ve gotten is one of those aforementioned projects above (it’s A.F., but also, it’s not).
Well, what we’re going to do here is outline a little basic methodology of each project’s form, be it novel, collection, etc., to measure the progress of how much exists versus how much needs to exist to be considered “done” by the publishing world.
And I mean a very basic methodology. The most basic methodology. The same sort of methodology we used in our college essays. Yes, exactly. We’re going to use a word count!
Yeah, it’s arbitrary for sure, but I’m hoping that seeing how much I have versus how much I have to go to be considered a full length [insert form here] will help motivate me to keep going in the long run. So we’re going to use math. How many words (or pages in the case of poetry) do I have compared to the number of words/pages I would need in the eyes of the publishing industry.
The funny thing about writing is that there are like standards to meet to be considered for entry into the published version of the art form. Like, the industry version of the art form. I’m sure most art forms are like this to some degree, though.
Anyway, here’s the basic sort of definition of each of my project’s forms as outlined by the powers that be:
Novel: Over 40,000 words (Usually between 70,000 and 100,000).
Short Story Collection: 40,000 - 60,000 words (or 120-250 pages).
Poetry Chapbook: 20 to 49 pages.
Poetry Collection: 48-120 pages.
For the sake of charting progress, I will be using the lower end of the ranges provided here to chart our progress to meet the bare minimum, just like we all did in college, baby.
I guess there’s no more stalling. We have our parameters. All that’s left is for me to go into my Folder in my Google Drive called “Writings” and check the word count of each of these files, then make some sort of graphical representation of the progress of each file. Like, I know what to do, it’s just the doing of it and seeing the vastness of where I am compared to where I need to be is daunting. Give me a second to collect myself.
A Second to Collect Myself
Did you know that when you “Count sheep” to fall asleep, you can think of a category with a lot of members and then try to name as many members in that category as you possibly can instead of visualizing sheep and counting them? It’s true! The goal is to distract the brain by filling it with a menial task that is too mundane to allow for disruptive thoughts that may keep you awake. If sheep don’t do it for ya, trying to name all of the SNL cast members from over the years just might.
The more you know!
Okay, Okay, Here’s the Progress Bars
For the sake of legibility, we’ve had to separate the fiction from the poetry, so let’s take a look first at our fiction progress below.
Wow, look at that color matching.
Yeah, see, this is what I was afraid of, sort of, kinda. Look, 40,000 words is a ton of words. You can write to the natural conclusion of something and think, “Oh boy, wow, this is like a novella length,” just to find out you’ve sort of just excluded yourself out of short story range and into the vast wasteland of nothingness between short story and novella. Also, no one wants your novella. (Novellas are like 20,000 words minimum).
But I digress, let’s break this down. We’re about 25% of the way to the bare minimum with G.J., which isn’t surprising since this is a relatively new work that I’ve just sort of started to wrap my head around in that it has chapters. This 25% to the bare minimum? Yeah, that’s about two chapters. So, I’m not really fretting the progress there (yet).
A.F., that chapterless beast, is a mess of needing to rewrite and rewrite and is sort of only half of the story that I want to tell. It’s sitting somewhere in the 40% range, but that beast is going to be tamed some other time. Rewriting is the hardest part of writing, don’t let anyone tell you differently. Also, I may need to restructure it because right now it’s structured as one long short story, sort of, and it could probably use some more room to breathe.
Then we have D.o.L.G., the short story collection. I was surprised to see we’re over the minimum here, but then I checked and well, the last story in that collection is the first chapter of G.J., so we might be cheating a bit. Also, the first chapter of G.J. was rewritten recently and doesn’t quite fit the structure of a short story any more, so that word count’s a little bunk. Needless to say, exciting that all I need to do is revise each story until I’m happy with them and maybe find a replacement for that last story? We’ll see.
Now let’s look at the poetry.
I do not know why the graphs look different. I made them at the same time.
Yeah, poetry is nebulous as heck. I don’t even have a project file for that second project, so I have no page count for you. Also, poetry is just weird. I don’t know how to measure the progress of it because it’s just a bunch of snapshots of individual ideas worded pretty and put next to each other in a book. That’s a gross reduction, but you get it.
I think progress with these poetry projects aren’t really a thing to be measured by page count. It’s nice to know that my chapbook is at least a good length, but I’m not at all happy with the poems in that collection. They all need a rewrite probably, so while it’s good to know we are there lengthwise, the quality is nowhere near finished. But hey, like the soldiers enlisted in the paramilitary organization known as “G.I. Joe” used to say, knowing is half the battle. The other half of the battle is no doubt lobbying for government contracts.
In Progress
So, this is where we stand. Maybe in a few months, I can update these charts with new page and word counts and show some real progress. Boy, that would be fun. If there was progress. And we got closer to our goals. Man, can you imagine? I can’t. And maybe I won’t have to because I’ll just do it, I don’t know.
There are a few other stray projects here and there like a few individual short stories that may or not be part of the collection that need to be rewritten and revised. Typically, when I get hung up with novel writing, I jump into something shorter with less bulk behind it and that’s either poetry or a short story (or this blog! hi!).
And that’s why the blog writing has sort of crawled to a slow pace in the recent weeks. That and it was my birthday last weekend and I didn’t feel like doing anything other than eating cake and hanging out with my daughter.
Anyway, hope to update you all in the future with some progress made. If nothing else, this got me through some jitters of perhaps reaching the end of the second chapter of G.J. with writing energy to spare but needing more time to think things through before committing fingers to keys.
Stay safe out there and have a good summer!
-Henry, written at 4:43 p.m. on a Thursday
I don’t sign these. What am I doing?
