Half-year Report

June 30th came to a close a few days ago, and with it ended the first half of this year. There were a lot of things on my plate that needed getting done for June which, combined with the fact that I had to take a an entire week off writing for a work-related trip, meant that this was going to be an absolutely jam-packed month.

Given my usual levels of procrastination and that week-long trip, June turned out to be almost as good as May (May Report). I did get a few things done and I’m really looking forwards to how July turns out. The month also ended on a high, as you’ll read below after the break.

May Report

I mentioned in my April Report that it had been a slightly better month with regards fiction writing when compared to March which was absolutely terrible because of a bad case of procrastination a weird disinterest in getting any serious writing done. With May, I really wanted to change things around as the Black Library submissions window was now hitting the middle of the stretch and I had one deadline in particular looming as well.

Well, May turned out to be much better than I had hoped, and I got some serious work done. I actually came quite close to the levels of work that I had done in January and February. That’s a good thing right? Well, if has certainly buoyed my spirits and given me a great ego boost. I am now more driven than ever to succeed with my writing.

The full lowdown for the month is after the break.

April Report

So its time again to do another end-of-the-month report. Overall, April was a somewhat better month where my writing is concerned as I managed to knock some submissions together and managed to get a headstart on editing my novel submission, but not by much really. The muse was hell of a lot more fickle than it usally is so I didn’t get anywhere near as much as I wanted to get done. On the reading front however, it was a blast, and I read some fantastic novels this month, and some not so fantastic as it turns out. Quite disappointed with two of my reads in particular – Giant Thief by David Tallerman (extremely disappointed) and Void Stalker by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (very ambivalent about it). And on the reviewing front, book reviews were posted fairly regularly while I only got around to posting a single one, I did write two. So that’s a target hit, I think?

Anyway, the lowdown is after the break.

First Quarter Report

At the end of January, on the last day to be exact, I did a blogpost about how the month had gone for me writing and reading wise. The plan at that time was to do that at the end of every month. But as it turned out, due to some extenuating circumstances such as two international trips and some other stuff (mostly work), I wasn’t able to knock out the February report. So I’m lumping it here together with the March report. Enjoy!

January Report

So the month is coming to an end and, in all honesty, it has been quite the ride in terms of both my reading and writing. As I mentioned in my end of December blogpost here, I had certain writing goals in mind that I was going to be sticking to for the new year and when I wrote everything down, my writing goals were quite ambitious. Later on, I posted here about my reading goals for the year as well and these two were equally ambitious, if not more so. Given that the first month is about to end, I thought I’d take the time to review those goals and see where I am currently in accomplishing those goals.

In The Emperor We Trust

If you have been following my progress on twitter for the last week or so, you can find me at @abhinavjain87, then you’ll know that work on the novel has been steadily progressing. In fact, it is better than steady because I’ve clocked an average of 2,900+ words over the last four days, which is my strongest performance ever. That average does kind of fall down to a measly 2,200+ however if I take into account the actual six writing days I’ve put in the project because the first two days weren’t really that good.

But, that is not the point of this post. Sure, I want to bask in the pleasure of doing so well on the writing front and share it with the world at large (and end up being accused of word e-peening in the process in which case you all haters can go take a hike) but I want to share just how I managed to do this.

So let’s see what really went down, huh?