Okay, I’ve gotten my act together and made goals for the year. I don’t really feel like going back over 2020 as a whole–I certainly made a lot of progress posts through the year, but it wasn’t all bad. I wrote a little over 150,000 words for the year, had a few stories published, completed two drafts and had one critiqued, and wrote most of another draft. I read lots of writing books and took a few writing classes, and I read some drawing books and took a lot more drawing classes.
I also spent a lot of time wasting time. I have a coloring game on my phone that I have spent a lot of time on, just saying. I think a lot of that came from having everyone around all the time, and trying to manage all their stuff too. It’s been hard to focus around all that, and when I have managed to squeeze out some alone time, I’m often too tired to give a story the attention it needs.
The small, mobile ones are back in school, though, so maybe I can turn that around. That being said, I do have a client edit that must be finished soon, so that takes priority. And who knows how long school will happen this time.
But, hey, I got my goals together. As I mentioned last week, my word for the year is polish.
As such, my main focus for the year is going to be revision, with the hopes that I can finalize some projects so my to-do list isn’t quite so long and overwhelming.
For drafting new words, my goals include:
- Finish the first draft of the Changeling story (at about 55K) or decide if it’s a lost cause
- Finish the first draft of World’s Edge (also at 55K)
- Perhaps poke the sequel to City of Hope and Ruin (which continues to be stuck in the mire)
I’m going to continue to do my drabbles related to larger stories, but I think I’m going to drop my Pinterest prompts for now. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that something new will come along.
For revision, I’ve got six projects:
- Boughs of Fate (Book One of the Ri’shan Trilogy, high fantasy)
- Rings Among the Stars (scifi horror novella)
- What Lurks Beneath the Bleachers (YA horror)
- Excalibur-1 (science fiction) (aka the space dinosaur story)
- Broken Mirrors (YA or MG fantasy)
- The cozy mystery I wrote in November
These are all in varying states. Book 1 is on its third complete draft, and I suspect just needs some finetuning in the beginning. I have feedback on the scifi horror novella, Bleachers, and Ex-1, but I haven’t gone through them yet. (Bleachers is on its second complete draft. You may remember me doing a fairly massive overhaul on it a few years back.) Broken Mirrors is the first story I ever edited, and I actually queried it for a bit, but when I read through it last year, it needed quite a bit of work. Also I need to make it solidly either YA or MG. Right now it’s kind of in the middle. And the cozy, being a different genre, well, I’ll have to figure how to handle that.
Other than that, I still need to query that picture book (has been ready since, like, March, I’m mostly avoiding it), work on my shorts, make some new SkillShare classes (any requests?), and look at making additional materials to go with the Writers’ Motivation series books and workbooks.
So! That’s my plan for the year, kind of in the order I’m going to work on them.
Planning anything big for the year, squiders?
