My Writing Efforts in July.

I am starting to feel a bit more like a writer who is actually doing more than dreaming about becoming a novelist. July has been my best writing month this year, as shown in the graph. I wrote 17,127 words of my novel in the month, an average of 552 words per day. And I reached my target of 500 words or more on all but two days of the month. Unfortunately, that means that once I met the quota, I did not usually write much more. The most words I wrote in a day was 821.

I have now written about 120,000 words of the novel. I had hoped to have the first draft finished this month, but my characters continue to resist making the inevitable decision to abandon their search and get to the climax. They’re not as bad as climate change deniers, though. At the moment, they are having an argument, and the pro-keep-on-searching characters are making a lot of sense—too much sense for them to just quit looking.

My characters obviously don’t care that I have committed to writing a short story for a Christmas collection, the first draft of which needs to be done by the end of August. So it looks like after this week, I might have to stop the novel writing for a couple of weeks and get onto the short story. This bothers me as I am so close to the end of the novel; I just want to get its first draft finished. But at least I have a good idea for the story.

Critiquing.

Once again, this month, I critiqued four stories for critters.org. The stories I critiqued were mostly by beginning writers, so my critiques were longish; two were over 1200 words. I finally finished a critique of a story for the Australian Writers Forum that was delayed by technology problems in June.

Reading.

I read a bit more this month. I finished reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. It’s not his best novel, but it was still a good read with a great central character. He was a journalist/writer secreted away from the law as he wrote a biography of a woman who created a computer virus that released thousands of asylum seekers from their prisons. The premise suggests a thriller, but the book is more about discovering how her life motivated her to release the virus. I hope to get around to writing a review of it for this blog later this month.

I am currently reading a science fiction classic in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend. A book that was turned into the classic science-fiction movie The Omega Man and the not so good recent movie with the same title as the book.

Non-Fiction.

Yeah, I know these updates should be only about my fiction writing endeavours, but I have to plug my Divine articles whenever I get the chance. I have a new article up on Divine that is all about a fascinating exhibition on the human mind I had a look at why I was down in Melbourne a few months ago. I really recommend the permanent exhibition and my article about it.