We’re right at the mid-point of 2015 so now seems like as good a time as any for a big State of the Writer post. The halfway point of the year always sneaks up on me. I truly can’t believe that it’s already July! I’m going to bold what each paragraph is about so that skimmers can easily find just the updates they care about. 

This past month has been all about my adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird. I’m making what should be the final round of changes before I start sending it out to beta readers. It’s mostly just trying to add a few more jokes, beef up the bits to be a little funnier. The fact that it’s already up on my homepage should be a hint that it’s pretty far along and I hope to have news for you about productions before the summer is out. Expect a big post on that in the near future because I actually kept much more detailed stats on this writing project than any I’ve ever done and I’m eager to share it with you.

While working on Green Bird, I’ve been re-reading Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone which I’m adapting into a commedia-like play tentatively titled The Fourth Orange. This title is because, as this is the collection on which Carlo Gozzi based his original Three Oranges, it seemed in the spirit of things to make it sort of spin-off from the Oranges/Green Bird universe, though I may change my mind on this as I go. I’m re-reading because I realized the translation I read the first time was heavily edited and censored from the original text and it didn’t feel right to try to adapt this without having read the original stories in some form. It’s been somewhat annoying to discover stories I was planning to adapt are completely different than I thought they were but it’s a necessary delay in the big picture, I think. My hope is to have a version of that play to show to people by the end of the year but it remains to be seen if that will happen. There a lot still uncertain about that project and it may still splinter into more than one thing.

On the non-fiction side of things. I’m working simultaneously on a follow-up to eBay Marketing Makeover and a NaNoWriMo book that you’ll be hearing much more about in the coming weeks because I plan to have it out by October. My hope is to finish the bulk of the NaNoWriMo book during the July session of Camp NaNoWriMo (mostly because how meta would that be?) and then just work on the eBay book here and there whenever I need a break from other projects. I don’t have a firm deadline in mind for that one other than Early 2016-ish. Right now, the above plays are the higher priority.

The other big thing I’m working on currently is the Middle Grade novel adaptation of my play Polar Twilight the status of which is a long story, one I’ll break out into its own blog post so this doesn’t get too long.

As early as it may seem, there’s lots to do for NaNoWriMo already and I’ve been booking events and whatnot for that. It always feels like the summer just ramps up and up until it hits the crazy banana pants insanity that is October through December for me and, while I do love most of it, when it starts up for the year there’s always this overwhelming feeling of ugh. Since I’ve changed my writing goals up where November marks the end of my writing year, I think that will, at least mentally, take some of the pressure off for the holiday season but we’ll see. There’s a lot I want to accomplish yet this year both personally and professional and time’s a wastin’, as they say.

As for my yearly word count goal, I started the year old with a goal of 500,000. As I’m only about 10k away from 400,000 words right now at the midpoint, I knew I needed to increase it but I wasn’t sure by how much. I finally decided to only increase it to 600,000 for the simple reason that it would represent an average of 50,000 words every month aka 12 NaNoWriMos. So far, March was the only month this year where I didn’t pass 50k, though I could have easily since I ended in the high 40ks and several months have gone in the 60ks so, so far so good. As of July 1st, here’s where I am on the total count…

390,723 out of 600,000 words (65%)

Less than 25% of that is what I call “free” writing which includes private journal entries and blog posts which means that 3/4 has been productive work on finish and polish things. I’ve gotten a lot done this year, more than in the past, so I’m feeling pretty productive even though my To Write List is still longer than I’d like. According to my little productivity app, RescueTime, I’m actually somehow managing between 30 and 40 productive hours every week which is pretty impressive when you consider those moments are stolen here and there between Mommy time. If I can keep working close to full-time hours in part-time spaces, I may just be able to pull this whole crazy thing off after all!

Lastly, I had a little epiphany about writing I’ll share in a future post that’s changed how I write. In the short-term, I expect it to mean less words written per day but, in the long-term, I think it will mean getting more things done over all. We’ll see. As far as I’ve come with this stuff, there’s so much I’m still figuring out as I go…

But I’m feeling pretty good about the first half of 2015 so far. How about you?