Just recently (Halloween Day, in fact) I finished what I hope to be the last draft of my book that I will do personally. That’s actually what I’ve been up to all of October for the most part, so now that it is time to hand it off and let someone else proofread and edit for a while I have some time to look forward. Figured I’d share a bit of a road map for what I hope to get completed in November.
No NaNoWriMo, But…
I haven’t ever participated in NaNoWriMo and hoped to this year, unfortunately a few things came up so I didn’t have the time to fully do any pre-writing for it. That said I came up with what I think will be a very good novella and intend to spend some of this month fleshing that out and getting all the pre-writing done now that I have a lot more time. Perhaps I will find an opportunity to do my own personal NaNoWriMo later, but in the worst case I will have everything ready to go for next November.
This is more of a personal goal than anything. Most of the time I feel like it takes me approximately an hour to write around 500 words when doing fiction. To write 50k words in a month I’d need to do slightly more than 3-times that, which seems like a good goal all around. I really like the idea of being able to get the rough draft of books out faster if I can do so while maintaining quality. Possibly expect to see a few posts on World Building as I go through getting this ready to go for next time.
Short Stories
Another goal I have set is getting a bunch of shorter fiction written. Not sure how much of that will end up being shared publicly, but expect at least a few to appear on here. If I come up with anything especially good I may submit it to some anthology if anything appropriate shows up.
These are things I like to do as they are sort of “play time” for me where I can just do whatever and try to improve. Shorter stories are really good for experimenting since they are quick(er) to write and if things don’t work out it can be put in the bin without having sacrificed much effort. There is one story in particular I know I’d like to finish, with another being a “maybe,” but on top of that I do want to get some shorter things posted up here so I have more content to offer on this blog than my inane rambling.
Mailing List
What I’ve currently got is basically something to throw up as a placeholder that could work on a short-term basis, however I want something at least somewhat robust first. There are a few ideas I think I’ll run by a few people to see if they like, but mostly I need to do a lot of reading to make sure I have everything set up in a way that won’t cause problems later. One problem I am already aware of, but the fix will either be quite simple or there will be nothing I can really do about it for now.
Really a lot of what I do here will be behind the scenes, so I doubt anyone will notice many differences (aside from possibly the sign-up). A lot of things like making templates for easy content delivery, making sure the messages don’t bounce, figuring out what I want to use the list for. On the very top, however, is coming up with a better name. Calling it a newsletter just seems too impersonal.
Pre-Writing the Next Novel
I already mentioned that I would be doing this for NaNoWriMo, but since I cannot work on my book any more until my editor is done with it now seems a good time to do a lot of pre-writing for the next novel. I’ve already done a fair bit since I hoped to be able to start writing this year (I actually did a little, but then decided it would be best to focus on learning the how’s for my first book for now). I’ve got a lot of good stuff, but now I think it is a little sparse so that will be getting fleshed out more.
Really not 100% sure when I’ll begin writing the sequel to In Honor’s Shadow, however it will be early next year at the latest. This month Is out because my plate is already full with the above details that need my attention, but December might be possible depending on how things fall. Going to make it a solid goal to get into it by mid-January, just in case.
