Mid-Hiatus Update (After 1 Month)

Hey readers!

I’m just popping in to give you a quick update on how my hiatus/writing has been going.

If you read my last post (my hiatus post) you’ll know that I’m on hiatus until I finish Battle Song because I’ve determined that’s the “one thing” (the most important thing) I need to do writing-wise.

Tomorrow it will have been one month since that post, so I wanted to give you some updates.

So how is the writing going?

It’s been going well! I haven’t written every day, but I have written a majority of the days in that month. Barely, haha. 16 out of 30. And I have definitely made progress.

Last month, Battle Song was 27,686 words long. Now it is 56,381. So not only did I pass the 50K mark (which is exciting!), but I also wrote 28,695 words this month. Okay, not as good as a NaNoWriMo, but still good!

I’ve been trying to write an hour every day, though occasionally it goes longer. It’s a lot easier now that it’s the summer! Yesterday I probably wrote for two hours, though I’m not certain.

Best of all, once I start writing, I usually get into it pretty quickly. Why is that? Well, here are the reasons I think.

1. My outline! It’s seriously a life saver. It’s so nice to not have to wonder what to write next. Of course, a few little things change now and then, but instead of taking time to think of what comes next, I’m able to spend that time writing.
2. My writing log. I’m not really sure why this is so helpful to me. Basically all I do is make a daily log of how much I wrote, how long it took me, and my writing speed in words per minute. It’s not really that I want to challenge myself because most of the time I don’t care about how fast I write (though I am getting faster). I think it’s just oddly rewarding to write down what I’ve written and calculate the speed.

Plus, I’m getting into some exciting stuff! In my Battle Song Q&A post, I mentioned the scenes I was most excited to write. Well, I’m on the first one of those right now, scenes 37-38! And it is exciting and fun to start revealing some new things.

But my overall feeling is: I want to be done with this draft! Not because I dislike writing in it (actually, I quite like it), but I want it to be done so that other people can read it! So they can compliment me? Probably. But it’s every author’s purpose to have their book be read by someone, isn’t it?

Probably just my family/friends will read this draft, once I’m done. And then there will be revisions. But…that’s still a long way off! Which leads me to the next part of this post.

Do you know when you’ll be back?

Well…not really. I’m still hoping to finish Battle Song by the end of summer, so hopefully by the end of August!

But this month I wrote about 28K. Assuming I write that much next month (which I’m not sure I will, considering I have two week-long vacations planned, that would bring me to about 85K. Another month would be 112K. I’m not sure if Battle Song will be quite that long, but it’s probably safe to assume I’ll finish sometime around the end of August.

That means I should be back, blogging again, near the beginning of September.

I’ll try to have another hiatus update post next month and see if I have a clearer idea on how close I am to finishing Battle Song. (I’m kind of hoping I’ll speed up the closer I get to the end, heh.)

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So, to sum up this post, the writing is going well, and I should be back in September if all goes well.

Talk with me!

How has this past month gone for you? Have you been working on writing projects? If so, what are they and how are they going? What is the best thing you’ve gotten to do this summer, and what are you most excited for with the rest of it?