Friday, September 23, 2016

New Goals

Is it any surprise that I'm changing around my writing goals? Good because it shouldn't be. Since finishing the rough draft of TQR I realized exactly how much more work it requires and how much time I actually have to work on it. I don't have that much time to work on it at all. So for now, every other project outside of TQR is being put on indefinite hold.

For the remainder of this month and then October I'm going to be writing "around" the story. By this I mean it's sort of stuff that I could have done in a prewriting phase, but it's also something I couldn't have tackled until I had the whole story on paper.  In November and December I plan to rewrite the rough draft which means by the end of the year I should be much much happier with the edition of this story that I have.

Some long term goals:
Jan2017/Feb-- Edit Rough Draft
Mar/Apr/May-- send off to alpha readers
Jun/Jul/Aug-- Write Second Draft

I'm hoping it doesn't take me this long, but even if it does I plan to start on my next project (which will either be Wheel and Cog or Lamp and Mirror).

Monday, September 19, 2016

I Finished My First Novel

I think it's going to take some time for that to actually set in. I finished. A novel. It's over. I wrote a whole story, beginning middle and end. Wow.

I'm not as excited as you might think. I have a lot more left to do. And I'm not that happy with this version of the story. So, yes, I will be hardcore editing the life out of this thing. And that DOES make me excited. I'm taking a break tomorrow from TQR, but I will be starting WaC and that's also very exciting.

TQR took me much more time than I thought it would. But I do think I've grown as a storyteller. I look forward to starting the next chapter of this journey.

Some quick stats:
129 pages double spaced
28,555 words total

That't not very many words. That's just about a novella. And, yes, this book started as a novella, but now I want it to be a novel.

So goals:
Bring it up to around 50,000 words. I don't care if it's only 40,000 but I definitely want it somewhere in that range.
Put into third person point of view.
Spend more time on secondary characters.
Describe more places and don't just have stock traveling scenes.
Do it by the end of the month.

Let's see if we can do this. (Read: nope but I can get far I think.)

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

hmmmm.... slacking

It's a little disheartening to realize I haven't written anything in TQR since exactly one month ago. Time to turn things around. My plan is to finish the rough draft this week and finally get around to that rewrite. Time moves so quickly!

On a side note: I also plan to finally sit down and start writing WaC tonight. I honestly couldn't be more excited it's going to be a lot of fun.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

September Writing Goals

It's been a while since I last posted and that's not due to the fact that I've been writing furiously. Because I have not been. Because I have been bad and easily distracted. Sad face.

Before I get into my goals, can I bring your attention to the name of the Blog. It was previously called Fernweh, and while I still really like that word, I wasn't in love with it as the title of my blog. So, for now, it's going to be called The Motley Bird, based off of a very strange bird that appeared in my dream last night.

Onto the goals!

I want to finish up the first draft of The Queen's Ransom. I have a feeling it will only take me sitting down and pounding away at the keyboard for about three hours to finish this one up, and I'm both excited and saddened that it will be over. But we both know that it's not exactly tip-top shape, so I also want to get most of the way through editing/rewriting the book. It's going to take pretty much all my time this month, but it's something I'm super eager to start digging into.

It's also time to finally start writing Wheel and Cog! I want to lock down the history of the world in the book (it's more or less our history but with a few modifications) and then I want to get about a third of the way into the book before all is said and done this month.

Not writing related, there are a few blog posts here I finally want to get around to writing. I tend to start posts and then not finish them and publish them, and since I hate scheduling things here and like it to be "of-the-moment" posting, I don't often like to share what is in the works behind the scenes here. But, these are two posts I think are important to get out this month. One is about diversity in books and why it's important and my take on it. I have a lot of things to say and I've been debating how to say them every morning for a week. I also want to write about what books mean to me. There's a little bit of a sad story in there, but nothing too bad.