Week 728

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week there were holidays to celebrate, and we drove west for my family on Christmas Day, and east for my wife’s family on Boxing Day. We stayed there for the rest of the week: I had a very organized writing desk and made some rewriting progress.

Check out my progress graphs here. The blue bars are word counts per chapter. Dark blue is the first draft, light blue is the second draft.

The top purple section shows my progress for the first draft. As for my made-up names for the writing phases: write down is where I get a chapter down on paper as quickly as possible. Write up is going through the text, filling in the gaps, adding detail, making it readable for other people than myself. Paper check is going through the text on paper and tweaking even more. As you can see, I never finished the paper check of that draft, sending it off to my editor and second reader in a slightly less polished state than planned.

The bottom purple section shows my current progress, on the second draft. Restructure is gathering all feedback, implementing my notes and organising the text in its new form. Second draft is finishing it all up. After which there’s another paper check, that I do together with my wife.

Besides working on my upcoming novel De verdwijners, I wrote three pieces for nrc.next, of which two were published: my column Local Multiplayer Mayhem and my review of Tale of Tales’ latest project Bientôt l’été, Eenzaam simulatiestrand.

And that was it for the year! See you in 2013.