The contractually required update on my writing activities for April 2015. Well, not really, but anyway …

April was a relatively straightforward month for me: I dedicated the entire month to finishing my final draft of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. (Spoiler alert: I finally finished the edit on May 5). I probably wrote some blog posts as well, but being a neglectful sort I failed to count those.

I did pretty well at getting up for my morning shifts. There were only five days that I overslept, and on several of those days I caught up during my lunchbreak. There was one morning that I got up in good time, but my youngest son also decided to get up early and was rather more in the mood for playing than for sitting quietly on the sofa. So, writing did not happen on that occasion.

This was by far my best month for editing (in terms of total word count), but that feat is tempered somewhat by the lack of any actual writing and the fact that it’s nowhere near my best average (that was February, during which I edited an average of 1806 words on the days that I did editing). Given that this was the ‘final’ draft of a story I already thought I’d finished, the obvious conclusion is that the story needed a fair bit of extra work and the decision to give it a final pass was the right one.

I also had a story rejected, which I view as more of an achievement than anything else. I’ve been attempting to write stories for quite some years now and, apart from a few efforts several decades ago, I’ve not really felt in a position to do anything other than self-publish. That I’m getting to the point where I think my stories might possibly be worth having someone else publish them is a mark, however potentially misguided, of how much more seriously I’m taking my writing these days. Bring on some more rejections!

The stats

  • Number of writing sessions: 0
  • Number of editing sessions: 26
  • Days missed: 4
  • Words written: 0
  • Words edited: 32,733
  • Average words written: 0
  • Average words edited: 1,259