Works in Progress
First draft:
Editing: The Amulet of Sìochàin
Subscribe by email!
Login
| 2011 Writing Goals |
| Friday, 07 January 2011 15:43 |
|
I sat down the other day with my lovely new diary and a notebook and tried to plan out my writing year. I started out with the list of goals I posted in October, and added and amended a few. These are my goals in a nutshell: JANUARY - Edits First and foremost, I need to finish typing up my line edits and get them sent out to a couple of beta readers. I was aiming for the 13th of January, but given that I'm now working most of next week I've moved that up - I want to get this done over the weekend. I'm averaging about 30 pages an hour and have about 270 pages to go, so I guess at that rate I'm going to need nine or ten hours... I'm hoping that I've remembered correctly and that there's less red pen on the later pages in the manuscript! And I have serious incentive on this one - I have a 10% discount for the Festival of Writing if I book before the 15th, and unless I get this done, I'm not letting myself go. At all. JANUARY/FEBRUARY - First Draft I need to finish the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel. I've been working on this intermittently since the end of NaNo, mainly on my Alphasmart on the way to work. My solid deadline is the end of February, but ideally I want it done before then. I was aiming for the end of January, but I don't think that's very realistic since I'm at 58K and probably not going to be able to stick to NaNo pace - certainly not until the edits are done. We'll see. MARCH/APRIL/MAY - Edits After that, I want to start editing the novel I started for NaNo 2009, The Bonded. I'm looking forward to that. Needs a lot of work, but I'm hoping three months will be enough to get the bulk of that done. JUNE/JULY/AUGUST - Short Stories I'd been considering getting another novel draft in here, but then I thought about it and realised that I really don't want that many unedited manuscripts sitting around at once! So I'd like to spend a couple of months working on short stories, partly to give myself a break from the edits and partly because it's a form I'm still not very familiar with. I think I'll go back and work through some of the stuff in Merrilee's Creativity Workshop that I didn't get round to, and revisit the stories I did manage to write. I'd like to get five short stories ready for submission by the time September rolls around. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER - Edits After that, it'll be back to edits, aiming to get the line edits done for The Bonded. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER - First Draft NaNoWriMo - the only time of year I seem to be able to sustain a decent writing pace for more than a couple of days, so it will be time to work on something new! These, of course, are only the bits that I think I'll be able to control. Once I've got feedback from my betas, fixing any problems with Amulet will become the priority again. When that's done, I think it will finally be ready to face the world. So somewhere in all of that, I'll hopefully start querying agents. The skeleton outline of the year is all very well, but my biggest goal is to make writing a priority. The funny thing is that it already is in many ways - but it's all too easy to let it fall aside from time to time, and that's what I want to avoid. I'm aiming for at least two hours of writing/editing on 'easy' days, i.e. those days when I'm not at work or particularly busy, and 30 minutes a day on busier days. Two hours is a lot, but I think I can do it. Some days, at least. ;) So far, 2011 is looking like it'll be rather busy! |