Jaycee Woods

While my first-year writing was for story drafting, since I have focused on editing.

Early on I was frustrated that editing takes so long. To pivot, I broke my first pass edit stage by splitting off two pre-editing steps to clean up my drafts, instead of trying to do three different things during the same pass edit.

By the time those formatting steps are completed, the draft has been cleaned up to read like a spartan story ready for the first pass editing step that focuses on building out the story’s narration. I have created three macros in Word to clean up and format the draft text to increase my productivity.

Below are some story count metrics on where my story backlog stood at the end of March month.

I don’t have a numeric goal for this year. My goal is more focused on establishing a funnel process to push drafts through to completion.

Note for novel length stories each chapter counts as a separate story for my metrics, as I count chapters and short stories as units of work during editing. I haven’t broken down into chapters any novellas, and a couple novel length drafts, so each currently count as one story.