July Goals Update

Hello hello again! I’m here again with a quick WIP update – I’ve been working really hard this month to crunch through as much writing as possible before school starts again in the fall, and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s turned out! I also wanted to share a new method I discovered to tracking progress, in addition to the monthly goals:

This little chart is something I found while watching through Bernadette Banner videos on Youtube, and something I decided to adapt to my own writing projects. It’s often super intimidating to look at a story and see just how much more there is to complete – I feel like I’ll never finish, and I’m just crawling towards the finish line without a way to physically see a progress bar. NaNoWriMo has nice built in trackers, but for me switching between projects, it doesn’t work too well. This graph let me break down each project into individual scenes, and it was so much more satisfying and motivating for my visual-learner brain to mark them off with pretty colors every couple days.

I’ll be using this again in August for sure, with a few alterations. Now that I’ve learned how many blocks = 10k words, I can make it more reasonable for one month of goals. I’m also going to leave the “other” column open to fill in as I complete fun extras. I noticed that I jumped around my TBR, and then didn’t mark off certain blocks because I read other books, so leaving that flexible will be able to more accurately reflect what I actually do!

Have you ever used one of these grids before? I’m sure there’s a name for it, but I haven’t seen it before. Do you think they would be useful to your own planning? Let me know what you think!

That being said, let’s get into the monthly goals, shall we?

Won by 3 points – 8/10

July website + IG scheduling: I kind of forgot that July had five Fridays and scrambled my posts to make it work out, but that means we got a bonus interview! You can read my conversation with Karkki about worldbuilding and mythology here if you missed it.

Write 10K in LAFA: This fanfic has been on hiatus for six months, and while I didn’t finish 10K, I did finish the one chapter that I was stuck on. Getting over the hurdle of getting started again after so long was such a feat. I didn’t win this goal but I’m happy that I’ve got the momentum rolling again.

Write 10k in Storge: This brings me through the convoluted middle part and back to the main plot! I finished chapter 9, and there’s only one more chapter of new rewriting to do before I can go back to editing proper. I expect the second half of the book to move a lot quicker than the first half, which needed to be almost completely rehauled, but I’m happy with how it’s moving along so far! A lot quicker than the 4+ years it took to write the first draft, that’s for sure…

Hit 20k in Runaways: I’m officially 2/3 of the way through the story, and it’s rolling along on pace now! I had a lot of fun with the midpoint twist and got to share a lot of fun faerie worldbuilding, plus introduce some fun side characters. I also realized that the story would be better told through present tense and so I need to rewrite the first half but it’s fiinnnne.

Reading Goals: There are two counted in here, but I even overshot that! This month I read Graceling and Fire by Kristin Cashore, The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by V.E. Schwab, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland, and How to Market a Book by Ricardo Fayet (which I covered in this post!). These were all 5/5s for me, so I can wholeheartedly reccomend all of them!

Put Out Jack of Fables: I’m sure you’re all sick of me talking about it but I’m so thrilled with how it turned out and I’m so excited to be sharing it with you finally. Also, sorting out the whole mailing list automation program was a huge learning curve and I’m happy to have figured it out. If you sign up at this link, the story will be sent to your inbox right away, and I’ll be sending out newsletters quarterly from now on out!

Put Music to Weswin Songs: I have three melodies and a bunch of lyrics, but haven’t figured out the accompanying musing yet. I’ve found that I have a soft spot for poetry and rhyme, so we’ll see if I can turn these drabbles into anything worth sharing in the future!

Draw 5 things: most of my subjects were from Runaways this month, and I shared one of my pieces in last week’s post – the Jack of Fables cover!

Reply to all the messages in my drafts folder: so over on tumblr I participate in a lot of tag games and WIP taglists. If I’m too busy to respond right away, I’ll click the notification, save the post to my drafts, and then reply later. Easy system, right? Yes, until I let it accumulate to over a hundred unanswered tags. oops. I’ve answered all of them now, and I’m doing better about keeping up (hopefully!)

Thanks for reading! I’m already looking at 2022 schedules, so if you want to request a topic for a blog post, feel free to message me or leave a comment. If you feel so generously inclined, you can support my writing by leaving me a tip on my Kofi or donating using the secure box below. Until next time, thanks for reading and happy writing! 🙂