Okay, So I’m not whining or complaining or getting angsty or anything. I did that a few weeks ago and it has sparked a near month-long period of reflection. I thought I had it all worked out when I wrote my last post, but that wasn’t entirely true and I haven’t written much at all in February as I tried to get it all figured out. I’m not sure I have it all worked out even now, but I’m going to try.

I have been stubborn and mule-headed and have kept posting goals that, had I chosen to be realistic about it, I would have known I had no chance of fulfilling. I am accepting that reality now. I’m going to let you in on the secret as well. Are you ready? Here it is:

I’m not Robert Jordan or Brandon Sanderson.

Here’s another one:

I never will be.

It will never be possible for me to write a 150,000 word story. I just can’t do it. I’m not capable of it. I have to accept that, and I have to realize that I’ll be lucky to ever even get to 80K. I have to therefore set my goals and strategy accordingly.

I have obsessed over word count in the past. I’ve tried to tell myself not to worry about count and not to stress over how long a story is. Good advice, but a bit shortsighted, in my opinion. See, to an extent, I have to worry about word count. I have to be aware of it, even as I try to not obsess over it. If I ever hope to get a novel published, it has to be at least a certain length to even have a hope of being considered.

From what I have read in various articles and blogs, a typical SFF novel comes in at around 100K words. Oh noes! I’ve just said that I would be lucky to ever get to 80K! How will I ever get a novel published, then? Here’s my idea, and, realistically, what might be a worthy strategy for me, given my tendencies: write YA novels.

YA, or young adult, novels are written for and about teens. Many wonderful authors (Scott Westerfeld, James Dashner, Suzanne Collins, Dan Wells, and others that I have enjoyed reading over the last few years) have made hay in the YA field, and others (Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson) have had successful forays into the younger demographic as well.

YA novels tend to be shorter. The articles and blogs I have read say that 85-90K tends to be on the long end for a YA. Westerfeld’s books have traditionally been in the 60′s or 70′s, with the Leviathan trilogy trending longer than that. That’s right in my wheelhouse.

The best thing is, you don’t have to sacrifice story complexity even though the length is shorter. I was afraid that I would find YA stories simplistic. That’s not the case, at least in the ones I’ve enjoyed the most. They aren’t simple at all, they’re just leaner. I’ve found that YA stories tend to be more linear, without the Jordanesque mess of subplots running around. Maybe one or two main plots and a subplot or two, but that seems to be it. Again, right up my alley.

So. What is the plan? I’m going to write YA. Thus, I’m going to throw Morpheus Rising in the trunk and go back to Sov. Yes! Sov! The last thing I have found with YA stories over the years is that they usually seem to revolve around a main character who is a YA themselves. I can do that, too–that’s what Sov has been about, for the most part.

First, I’m going to pull Myron’s story (Everlasting Tunes) out of the trunk I put it in last fall and finish it. Remember–it’s the story of a young bard-in-training getting his start in the world. How YA is that? After that there are two other Sov novels already in the can. Mother’s Daughter features a teenage girl coming of age in the glare of prophecy. It needs to be rewritten, but that’s YA too, yo!

Silvershield isn’t remotely YA in either existing iteration, but over the last few days I’ve been brainstorming ways to make it so. If I can pull that off then my three-novel Sov cycle would be totally YA; probably between 65K-75K each. I can do that, and it’s a realistic goal in terms of the way I write.

I’m not going to push to get all three done this year. That’s not to say it can’t be done. If I can get some good work done on Everlasting Tunes and Silvershield between now and November, I might be able to make a Mother’s Daughter rewrite my 2011 NaNovel. Maybe I could get them all done in 2011. Not gonna push for it, though. Really.

All I want to do in 2011 is finish Everlasting Tunes, write some short stories, and do NaNoWriMo, whatever it turns out to be. I think I can do that. That’s what I’m going to push for: more realistic goals. It’s a big adjustment in my thinking, and I have to stop stressing over not being able to write 150,000 words. YA is my path. It has to be, if I write the way I know I can. Wish me luck, and keep supporting your local novelist!

I’ve thought it over. After some great discussion the other night, I am looking at my goal-setting for each individual writing session. I’ve been very focused on word count as a goal–how many words did I write tonight? I’m still going to look at word count as an overall measure of my long-term performance and my accomplishments during the year as a whole. I do want to be accountable to a quantitative measure, and word count is the best way I know of, as a writer, to achieve that accountability.

In terms of what I do each day that I sit down, though, I am going to try to focus on the amount of productive time spent writing. Rather than look for, say 1,500 words in a session, I will look for at least one productive hour in a day, whether it is on the van, at home, or split between them as it was today. There is always going to be pressure on me as a writer because my word count goal is always looming ahead of me, but it helps to have that number out there as a guidepost. If I stay productive in my “one hour at a time” approach like I did last summer, I’ll meet my word count goals with ease and hopefully a lot less stress.

For what it’s worth, SF author Jay Lake posted an interesting article on his blog today about word count and his own interest in using it as a performance measure. You can read it here. He feels the same way I do about it, it seems, even if he is more devoted to word count as a day-to-day measure, which I am trying to get away from. It’s a nice article if you give it a read.

That’s it for now. I made some progress and I think I’ve had a bit of an epiphany as far as putting pressure on myself (or not) with realistic daily goals. I’m set up for a productive month, I think. Keep coming by and supporting and let’s see if I can manage to pull it off this time.

About half of what I wrote tonight was repurposing of stuff that I wrote back in 1999. I wrote a short story back then called “Morpheus Rising” that I had always thought might be a prologue for this novel idea if I ever got around to writing it. Well, I’ve gotten around to writing it, so I brought the old short story in to serve as the beginning as I had always intended. I did some editing and put some new stuff into the middle of it and left quite a bit of the ending out, but it helped me get a good start down on paper.

One last note–I changed the name of the book. It is now Morpheus Rising, in honor of the original short story. I think it fits the idea a lot better than The Lotus Eaters did.

I’m going to close this entry out with the two quotes that I put in as epigraphs. They really set the tone for the work, I think, and let you know where it’s heading. Keep coming back for updates as I really get going.

“…Morpheus became fascinated by the way a little corner of man’s mind remained awake in sleep…It seemed to him that these fantastic colored shadows the sleepers painted were the most beautiful, most puzzling things he had ever seen. And he wanted to know more about how they came to be.”

Bernard Evslin, The Adventures Of Ulysses

“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3 Scene I

I want to start working on my big goal for the year, my 150K word novel, The Lotus Eaters. I haven’t started yet. Why? Is it a lack of motivation? A lack of confidence in my ability to do it? Are my priority values just out of whack again? Or is it something more serious?

Sometimes I’m not certain that I’m cut out to be a novelist. I have the talent, but I’m not sure about my motivation. I have a hard time with setting my priorities. I’ve talked about it here before. I have a hard time turning off the Internets and the TV and everything else to get even an hour of writing time in at night. I can’t even get motivated to take advantage of the hour I have on the commuter van everyday. I mean, shoot, Peter Brett wrote his first novel on a smartphone during his commute. I can’t even manage it on a laptop? Girl, please.

I don’t know. I do wonder if I have what it takes to do this. I wrote Mother’s Daughter during May-June 2008 while I was unemployed. I’ve done the last three NaNoWriMos. Other than those periods I haven’t really done any extended writing at all, for whatever reason. I wish I could get it together, but I am getting less and less confident in my ability to put my distractions away and write.

This is a real personal crisis, folks. Whether I ever get anything published or not, one of my goals in life has always been to write a “real” novel–something of serious length, more than just a NaNoWriMo novel. I can handle the short story goal, and I know NaNoWriMo won’t be a problem, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to manage to fulfill my extended length novel ambition. It’s killing me, and I don’t know what to do.

Do I try it, most likely fail, and get even more discouraged if I do fail, or do I bail on the idea and the goal and concentrate on shorts and NaNo? I just don’t know. Comments? I’ve been saying it for three years, but your local writer really does need some support and help here. I need to figure out what I want to do. If I want to put in serious effort and complete The Lotus Eaters before NaNoWriMo hits I need to get started ASAP. I need to make a decision. Help meeeeeee!

You can see my updated word counts in the sidebar. I’m planning to start The Lotus Eaters this week and get marching towards 150K. I’m also ready to clean up “Fundamental Moments” before the end of February. I’m definitely looking forward to a productive February. Keep coming back and support your local writer!

I told you a couple of weeks ago that I had entered a contest at Writer’s Digest. I did not make it as a finalist, even though my entry was clearly better than the ones selected. Really! Oh, well. Their February contest is up, though, and I will be entering that. I will update as applicable.

I wrote on the van today for the first time this year. I began work on my January short story. You recall that one of my goals is to write a short each month. I got 1,242 words down on a short that I am calling “Fundamental Moments”. I have absolutely no idea where it is going and am pantsing the heck out of it. I plan to write some more tomorrow. It has to be done by Monday or it’s not a January story. I can do it!

I’m planning to start working on The Lotus Eaters at the beginning of February. I’ve been doing some brainstorming and am still trying to decide whether to pants it or plot it out. It won’t be a pure pants, as I do have the synopsis I wrote in 1996. I strongly suspect I will be deviating greatly from that, though, so it may not even count as a true synopsis. We will see. I also suspect the title will be changing. The more I look it, the more I think that title bugs me. We’ll see. As I said, work on the story will begin in February.

Total word count for the year so far is going to be shown on the sidebar, as will Lotus Eaters total count and cumulative count for all short stories. Keep coming by to keep an eye out on my progress, wish me luck, and support your local writer!

As far as the big novel project, The Lotus Eaters, I have decided to spend January plotting and planning. I might even try to outline it rather than pantsing. I haven’t done that in a long time, and I’ve never been really successful. Still, with a project as long as I’m planning on this one being I want to have some sort of structure in place before I begin. Further updates will be forthcoming during the month as I begin to suss out what I want to take place. Until then, wish me luck with my contest and watch this space for short storyage. Hopefully that will be coming soon.

Support your local writer in 2011!

The last two years I have set fairly modest goals and came nowhere near to completing them. The things I have in mind for next year are magnitudes beyond anything I have ever tried, but I’m going to buckle down and get serious about getting it done.

First, let me emphaticize something. My goals for 2011 will have nothing to do with submitting anything for publication. I’m not going to put that sort of pressure on myself. Hopefully I will be submitting things throughout the year, and if I do I will continue to publicize my successes or failures on the blog (not that I’ve had any successes yet. Yet). However, I am not going to tie submissions into my writing goals. I will confine my goals to the actual writing of stories, not to what happens to them once they are written.

Having said that, here are my goals for 2011.

1. Write a total of at least 250,000 words. Yes, I said that. That’s not going to be one project, obviously. I’m going to keep a cumulative total of everything I write next year, and when I add it all up at the end of the year I want to be at 250,000 or more. Note also that blog posts will not count towards that total. Those 250,000 words are going to be story- or project-specific.

How am I going to get those words?

2. Long-form story: Write a novel that is going to be at least 150,000 words long. This is my most ambitious goal for the year. I’ve never written anything that came in over 57,000 words. To get to 150,000 would be well beyond anything I’ve ever done before.

I have an idea that I’m going to use. It’s actually an idea that I first came up with in 1996. At that time I was reading a lot of Dean Koontz thrillers and Stephen King stuff like The Tommyknockers. I had this idea for a dark thriller and I think I can update the idea and bring it into the modern day. Lately I’ve been reading James Rollins’s Sigma Force books, which I liken to Tom Clancy mixed with Clive Cussler with some DaVinci Code thrown in. I can take my old idea from ’96, throw in some Rollins-influenced action and intrigue and my love of SF/Fantasy and come up with something that would read like Matrix-style cyberpunk with some gritty dark fantasy thrown in if I can figure out how to do it right.

You know I like to get my titles set before I even start writing. Back in the day I called this idea The Lotus Eaters so I’ll stick with that for now. I have a five-page synopsis that I wrote back in 1996 and some other notes and stuff that i wrote back then so I’m already ahead of the curve. I’m ready to get started and work towards 150,000 words. I found out last year I can write on the vanpool so look for a lot of that this year. I want to have this story completed before November so I can concentrate on NaNoWriMo without losing time on my other project.

Which leads to my next goal:

3. Long-form story: Complete NaNoWriMo for the fourth year in a row. My tendency in NaNoWriMo has been to come in just over 50,000, so I will set my NaNoWriMo word count goal at 50,000, which will make me a winner. At this time, I think I know what I might be writing my NaNovel about, but I’m not going to mention it yet. I want to stay focused on The Lotus Eaters for now. No need to get the cart ahead of the horse.

4. Short-form stories: Write a short story every month. This is also an extremely ambitious goal. I want to end the year with at least twelve shorts written. If I can average 4,000-5,000 words, which I think is doable, I can easily get over 50,000 words down just in short stories. this is going to be ambitious because I will be writing shorts at the same time I am working on my longer projects. Can I write two stories at the same time? We shall see.

As I said before, I am not putting any expectations towards submission of these stories into my goals. Although I fully intend to submit them, I’m not going to base my goals on that. I’m more concerned with actually getting them written. Submissions are bonuses.

5. My final goal is to enter some writing contests. I’m going to look around and find contests that I can enter and use that as motivation for writing. I might be able to use stories I’m writing as entries or I might have to write more. If I do that I can add those words to my cumulative total for the year. I think it would be fun to enter some contests and winning would be even better. Of course, if I enter anything I’ll put the information on the blog and let you know what’s going on.

In summary, then, these are my goals for the year:

1. Write at least 250,000 words in my various projects over the course of the entire year.
2. Write a novel, The Lotus Eaters, at a length of at least 150,000 words.
3. Complete NaNoWriMo 2011 at a length of at least 50,000 words.
4. Write one short story each month for a total of at least 12 short stories during the year.
5. Find writing contests to enter, using already written stories if possible, or new material if necessary.

I’ll be posting a word count tracker for The Lotus Eaters, one for short story cumulative totals, and one for the 2011 cumulative total. Keep coming back to see how I’m doing. I’ll definitely need the support as I push towards these crazy word count totals. Happy New Year to all, and please keep supporting your local writer.

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