My writing efforts in September

Once more, it has been a while since my last post. I have been extremely busy writing and doing other writing activities, as you will see in my update for October.  But this post is about September.

In September, my Ulcerative Colitis decided to remind me of its existence, so I had to take some medicine, which made me extremely tired for just over half the month.

At the beginning of September, I was writing a short story for a Christmas anthology that a few members of the Australian Writers Forum were creating. I finished the story’s first draft on the same day I started taking the medication. At that stage, the story was 9,800 words, 3,800 words over the suggested word limit.

I redrafted the story over the next few days, reducing it to 7,400 words. I then printed it, proofread and edited it many times over the next few weeks. I found a lot to change each time and eventually reduced the story to 7,200 words. On the last day of the month, I finally submitted it to the group for critiquing. I then returned to the novel I had been writing.

One reason I made so many changes when proofreading was that the story was in the third person. I had not written in the third person for a long time, and my tiredness probably had something to do with it, too.

I estimate that I wrote 8,746 new words for the month, much lower than for the previous months (as shown in the graph), but I expected my word count to drop when editing. I averaged 291 words per day. Only on nine days did I reach my quota of 500 words. I proofread/edited for at least two hours on about six days.

Critiquing

Due to tiredness, I only managed to critique about ten thousand words of the novel I am critiquing. Sorry, Peter. Ideally, I wanted to critique about twice as many words.

Reading

I read bugger all due to tiredness. I’m still reading Dust, the third book in Hugh Howey’s Wool series.

Non-fiction writing

I had another article up on Divine in September. It is about smart homes for people with disabilities. Divine has been having computer problems, which has meant my story hung around on its front page for nearly all of September. I also had the second and fourth articles listed on the site for that period. But I did not write any articles in September due to…