January: My Writing Efforts.

In an attempt to motivate myself, I have decided to write a monthly blog post about my writing efforts for the previous month.

Novel Writing.

I am currently writing a young adult novel, Branded. I wrote the first chapter as part of a writing for young adults subject in a Master of Creative Writing I finished in 2007. I then filed the chapter away as I concentrated on other writing. I pulled it back out for last November’s National Novel Writing Month, adding just over 50,000 words in that month. In January, I added a further 4816 words, an average of 155 words a day.

The novel is now just under 60,000 words. It has five parts, and I have just started part four.  It looks like it will be somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 words.

I am still very much enjoying writing it, especially after I just managed to get most of the dysfunctional group of characters back to working together.

Non-Fiction Writing.

I had two articles up on Divine last month, twice as many as usual. One was on robots helping people with disabilities and the other gave some reasons for the low participation rate of the people with disabilities in the workforce.

I successfully pitched four ideas to the editor. Two of the articles will be film reviews. I am currently writing one of them. They will be slightly different from the typical film review because of their disability angle.

Blog Writing.

I wrote four blog posts last month; the last one took a lot of time to research and write as I analysed the novels on the Goodreads Choice Awards science fiction list.

Reading.

I am halfway through Lauren Beukes’s very enjoyable science fiction novel Zoo . It is a mystery novel set in a marvellously inventive near-future South Africa.

Critiquing.

I did not make time to critique anyone else’s writing in January. Not good.

But I did write every day of the month.

Health permitting, I hope to improve significantly on my writing and reading efforts in February so these monthly posts don’t start resembling a guilt sheet.