LeFou, I’m afraid I’ve been thinking.
It’s been almost three months since I completed NaNoWriMo. I’ve only written twice since then. it’s been almost a month since I laid out my writing goals for 2010 in this here blog. I’ve only written once since then, making some (in retrospect) highly unsatisfactory revisions to “Derelicts” which I sent to Lee. Of course, his wife immediately had a baby, so I haven’t heard anything from him. Hopefully he hasn’t read them yet. Looking back, I think the story is weaker than it was before. I need to redo it. Lee, if you’re reading this, delete that horrible story I sent you so I can fix it.
Anyway, that’s not what I’ve been thinking about.
My writing has ground to a halt since the end of November. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think I finally have. Simply put, I’m tired of working on Silvershield. Two NaNos in a row devoted to it with intermittent revision periods in between mean that I’ve been working on it for almost a year and a half now and it’s not really anywhere near being done. I’m dissatisfied and burned out on it.
What’s the solution? Easy. Put it in a drawer and lock it away and start working on other things. I even have an idea. You might remember back a year or so ago I was talking about working up an idea centered around my treasured old character Myron. I put it away because Patrick Rothfuss wrote The Name Of The Wind and got me started down a whole pathway fraught with fears of inadequacy and being derivative. Freaking Rothfuss and his awesome book. Read it immediately, if you haven’t already.
At this point I say HA! and HA! again to those fears. I’m finally ready to tell Myron’s story. I’ve been doing some brainstorming and am hoping to start getting some writing done this weekend. It’s going to be more than just Myron’s story as it turns out; there will be a couple of other characters, friends of his, who will be in the story as well. I’m hoping it will be a light-hearted buddy story with adventures and young men coming of age in a world that is a lot larger than they ever dreamed. The working title will be Everlasting Tunes. Wish me luck and keep on the lookout for updates.
That having been said, let me restate my writing goals for the remainder of the year:
Everlasting Tunes goals:
- Complete the first draft of Everlasting Tunes.
- Tweak as necessary to create the second draft.
- Send the second draft to my faithful alphas for dissection.
- Assuming they get it back to me, create the third draft using their feedback and start shopping the book to agents (if we think it’s good enough).
Non-Tunes goals:
- Rewrite “Derelicts” and submit it to a qualifying SFWA professional market besides Strange Horizons (since they already turned it down).
- Write another short story for submission to Strange Horizons.
- Write another short story and get it making the rounds as well.
- Complete NaNoWriMo 2010 without involving Silvershield in any way.
To boil it down, my goals this year are:
- to get Everlasting Tunes to my alphas and possibly beyond–to start shopping it around if I can.
- to have (at least) three short stories making the submission rounds.
- to complete my third NaNoWriMo.
Further updates to come. Please support your local novelist.
I too have changed my writing goals. I will write at least one page on days that I work and at least two pages on days that I don’t. That’s it. Just grinding it out.
Pingback: A look back: 2010 in review « Writing The Egg