Landmarks

I just got a check in the mail from New Ohio Review for my short story “Smoke,” making that the first time I’ve gotten paid for my fiction, outside of self-publishing. Yahoo! I scanned it to make a copy in case I want to frame it and put it on my office wall, like George Jefferson did with that first dollar bill he earned at his laundromat. Movin’ on up.

Also, I hit a cool milestone today while working on my novel-in-progress. Every time I work on it, I rename the file by upping the number that comes after my working title (still top secret). So Title1, Title2, etc. Today I worked on Title100. One hundred sessions so far, which puts me about fifty pages in. So if I maintain this pace of producing half a page a day (which is pretty slow, but that’s my life right now) I’ll have over 200 rough draft pages written by the end of next school year. That’s roughly 60,000 words, which just might be the length of this thing. We’ll see.

But it’s cool to have my first real timeline on this project, a doable goal I can work toward. And thinking beyond that, maybe I could have a first revision done by the end of next summer. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself…