August Report

August is finally over!! Its been a long and tiring month but oh so fun! Extremely productive too, for which I feel like continuing to celebrate. Yeah, it was THAT good.

To do a small recap of my goals for the year,

1. Write ~420,000 words of both fiction (various submissions and novel projects) and non-fiction (reviews and blogposts).
2. Read 300 novels, comics, novellas, stand-alone short stories (still not sure if these SHOULD be included) and listen to some audio dramas and audiobooks.

At the end of July, I was ever closer to my goals, having crossed the ~257,000-word mark, out of ~420,000 words and was still ahead on the reading goals, as I was at 167/250 on June 30th. You can find the July report here.

2012 Writing Challenge

1. Project: Hammer of Shadows – My plan for this was to complete the project so I could start doing edits for September. Didn’t work out as planned at all. I ended up working on the project below and just never got around to this. However, I think that separation of time was good because I can go back to this project with some fresh eyes and get it done. Staying positive!
2. Project: Dharmayoddha – All I had originally planned for this project was to do the first 3,000-words and then go from there. This also didn’t work out as intended AT ALL. I crossed that goal in just 3 days of writing, then made a goal to do 3,000 more words, hit that in 3 more days, then repeated the same thing over THREE MORE TIMES until finally, by the end of the month, I had almost 16,000-words down! Talk about hitting goals! So I’m in a really good place right now as the project is a little over the 50% mark and I can already see the ending. The scenes I’ll be working on now are all action scenes mostly and I can’t wait to get to them. Writing this story has been mostly a breeze, with only two days wasted when I had writing issues. The wordage has been flowing superbly. The goal for this month is the next 5,000-words and then take it all from there. For anyone interested, I have a teaser of the novella on the blog here.
3. The Founding Fields – I’d like to say that this wasn’t so good a month as I only did one guest review (Immortal: Demon in the Blood for Civilian Reader) and my reviews this month were generally shorter (the average is the lowest yet at ~1400-words a review). But thing is, I’m still pumping out reviews at a good pace. The reviewing schedule has also gotten a little relentles as there are lots of open slots currently since some of the reviewers on the site are on a hiatus. And I’m taking every opportunity I feasibly can to get through my to-review pile. To that effect, I started doing a comics round-up series for comics in which I’ll be covering reviews from across reviewers for single issues of ongoing/old series. It certainly helps! The first one is here. I’m considering wider avenues for reviewing in terms of guest reviewing; will see how that works out. Stay tuned for more info. In the the meantime, the goal is still to do 9-12 reviews a month.
4. 24FPS Movie Reviews – Last month (July) I posted two reviews. This month (August) I managed to get one out – The Dark Knight Rises. I did see a fair few movies this month though – Brave 3D, Expendables 2, and Ek Tha Tiger (Bollywood flick), so it wasn’t for lack of content. Just about motivation is all. I’m considering doing a movies round-up post, same as the one I’m doing for comics at TFF. Will keep you folks updated.
5. The Blog – August was another good month for the blog. There was last month’s report of course, then the teaser from my current work-in-progress novella. I also did a review-ish post about “Why I Love Dune“, which was about my love for Frank Herbert’s award-winning classic, Dune. I’d been listening to the audiobook you see and listening to it brought back memories which I wanted to share. Rounding off the month was a post about what I would like to see the Horus Heresy authors write about in the coming months beyond what we already know – “Horus Heresy: Thoughts Part 1“. I’ve got material for at least two more posts and they will both be going up this month for sure. Do chime in on the topic! Would love to hear what people think

So yeah, August totally rocked in almost every way and I’m really happy with how things have worked out. I’m definitely in very high spirits right now. I could have squeezed in another 2,000-words of fiction writing down at least, I’m sure of that, but I didn’t want to burn myself out on the project as yet so I took breaks in between days of writing. The same for guest reviews. I should have a minimum of two guest reviews out this month (September) however.

In total, the writing for the month amount to a grand total of ~43,250-words, which is about ~10,000-words more than I did in July! The credit is all due to Project: Dharmayoddha and the great start I got on the project in the second week of the month. Writing 1,000-words a day was never sweeter!! My total for the year so far is now just a bit over ~300,000-words. That means I’m more than 70% done with the goal of ~420,000-words and going strong, especially if my fiction writing holds up for the coming four months!!

Related to both my reading and writing for September is that I’ve been talking with a fair few authors, debut authors from 2010-12 mind you, and if all goes well then you will be seeing a series of guest posts from all these fantastic people on the blog soon. The topic is the power and significance of names. It is a fascinating topic for me, and I’ve written two blogposts about it previously (here and here). So yeah, stay tuned to this space for more information. I’ve already had a couple entries in the mail and the stuff is great. In about a couple weeks’ time I should have a formal schedule of posts up, and start the promotion of the series.

2012 Reading Challenge

August was another great month of reading, some truly great novels and comics, although there were a few disappointing ones here and there, such as War of the Spider Queen Vol.2 (on the whole as a collection) and Before Watchmen: Rorschach #1. One good thing about the month was that I’m progressing through quite a few series, be it comics and novels, which is really important at the moment. With all the reading this year, I’ve started on way too many novel/comics series and it all keeps piling on one after another, which is not so good.

Still, I hit the goal for August, as I said in the July Report: 200/300 being the target, and the counter actually reading 207/300. Unlike the previous months, I’m not going to increase the final target count. Might do it closer to November, but I doubt that I’ll really need to. We shall see.

Here are the top picks for the month of August:

Top 3 – Horus Heresy #21: Fear To Tread by James Swallow, Dragon Apocalypse #1: Greatshadow by James Maxey, and Brave New World #2: Revelation by Matt Forbeck.

Honourable Mentions – Wild Hunt #1: Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper, Horus Heresy: Grey Angel by John French, and Horus Heresy #22: Shadows of Treachery by Various.

Top 3 [Comics]: New 52: Nightwing #1-6 by Kyle Higgins, Battle Beasts #1-2 by Bobby Curnow, and Danger Girl & G.I.Joe #1 by Andy Hartnell.

Honourable Mention [Comics]: G.I.Joe Cobra Command Volume 2 by Chuck Dixon, Immortal – Demon in the Blood by Fumi Nakamura/Ian Edginton, and New 52: Justice League #1-6 by Geoff Johns.

Bring on September!

Update:

Some new acquisitions of mine –

EarthRise by William C. Deitz. I’ve read the first novel in the duology, DeathDay, ages ago and really liked it. Finally have the sequel for this First Contact/Alien Invasion two-part series.

The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey. It was the cover that made me pick it up, as well as the name. Going to be my first experience with the author. Should be good stuff.

Star Wars: Fatal Alliance by Sean Williams. An Old Republic novel. I’ve read Paul Kemp’s Deceived, which I thought was rather decent. I love the Old Republic era, so this should be good too.

WarCraft: The Shattering by Christie Golden. One of the better received WarCraft novelists, and having read Rise of the Horde, I can agree. This novel is a prelude to the Cataclysm expansion to World of WarCraft and as such, should be REALLY good. High expectations.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. Have finally taken the plunge here. Will see how it goes.

Dune: House Harkonnen and House Corrino by Briant Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Picked both of these up cheap at one of my local bookstores. Read them back in the day in high school and loved how they expanded on all the stuff from Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicles. Can’t wait to begin my Dune-verse read through in October/November!!

The 2nd-4th novels in William King’s Terrarch Chronicles series. I liked the first novel and wanted more and finally got these. Good stuff.

The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer; Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole; Underworld Detection Agency #1: Under Wraps by Hannah Jayne and more. All part of my growing drive to read more and more debut authors!

Gathering of the Lost by Helen Lowe. The second Wall of Night novel. Loved the first one, and this should be just as great.