Quarter Two Twenty Nineteen: A New Writing Cycle Begins

Ninety-two days. Thirteen weeks.

That is the number of days in the second quarter of 2019. Well, it's actually the same number of days in any second quarter of any year, but I digress.

Over the past five or six years, the second quarter of the year has become my favorite quarter. Spring is on the rise and summer beckons. The end of a school year and, well, summer beckons. I haven't been in any sort of school for the past twenty years, but I've always kept a 'school year' calendar in my head.

Second Quarters indicate a shift in the types of music I listen to, movies I watch, and books I read. Gone are the music/books/movies associated with the 'darker' months. Here are the music/books/movies associated with bright, sunny, and hot days. Action/Adventure books. Bigger-than-life movies. Music to drive around town with the windows down. It's a grand time.

New Writing Cycle

As a writer who has a day job, I do not have the opportunity to write for longer than about an hour day day. Some days, ninety minutes. On really good days, it can be two hours.

I compensate by writing along the calendar. New projects start on new months. And today is the start of not only a new month but a new quarterly writing cycle. Think about it: if you write 1,000 words a day for the entire quarter, you'll have 92,000 words of fiction. Imagine what you can do with that.

• Nine 10,000-word novelettes. 
• Eighteen 5,000-word short stories. 
• One long novel. 
• Two short novels. 

What could you do with, say, eighteen different and/or connected short stories? How about two short novels? What about that novel you haven't finished yet?

A bit of poor planning on my part means I'll be spending the first few days of the quarter completing a novelette I started in Quarter One. And then I'll have to complete the sixth Calvin Carter novel.

But I also plan on writing new tales. And what makes this little endeavor fun is that I don't know what I'm going to write. It'll be just as exciting for me to craft the tales as it will be for folks to read them someday in the future.

I think of this as a NaNoWriQua: National Novel Writing Quarter.

What will you accomplish with your 92 days?