Thoughts

I just had a slight freak-out moment. I was sitting on campus, revising some short stories for my creative writing class, when I remembered the slew of campus-related short story contests with deadlines in February. This caused the following train of thought:

Speaking of February, Amazon's annual Breakout Novel Award contest is in February.

Holy shit! February! That's two months!!

I wanted to have IE ready for it in February 2009 but I wasn't ready in time. I swore to myself I'd be ready in 2010.

Holy shit, I won't be ready in 2010! This time last year I was at the same point in my first draft as I am right now in my 2nd draft. I thought I could do it, but I couldn't. There's no way I can polish it by February.

Another year. ANOTHER. YEAR. that I haven't met any of my writing goals. Another year that I have sworn to myself I'd meet a deadline and I haven't.

Another year IE isn't done, when the 1st draft was 75% done in 3 months. The other 25% and 50% of the 2nd draft I have done now have taken about 16 months to finish. And I still have the rest of d2 and at least another draft.

Why can't I meet my goals? Will IE ever get finished?

I love IE. I want to finish it!!

Arrrgggghhhhh!!!!!!!

.... and those were my thoughts. It's finals time, can you tell?

NaNo's Over -- Now what??

Well, I did it. I wrote over 50,000 words in 30 short days. It was tough, but I loved it. But now I have this nagging question.... What do I do now?

I picked IE back up and made some drastic decisions about it. Instead of 3rd person, past tense, which has ALWAYS been my preferred writing style, I've decided to switch to 1st person, present tense. I feel like the whole thing flows more smoothly, and readers can connect with the MC much better this way. My opinion was backed up by my loyal reader, Mandy... and I *will* make her pay for the 80,000+ words I now have to revise!!!

So, here's my goal. I want to have IE finished by the new year, the rough draft that is. Then, I'm going to spend January revising her. And revising her. And revising still. And Mandy's going to help. And then I'll revise again.

THEN... my goal, as crazy as it sounds, is to have it revised to the point where I'm not ashamed to show it to people... and submit it on February 2, 2009, to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest, found here: http://www.amazon.com/abna . I know it's a really long shot that I'll have anything actually finished by then, and this contest was part of the reason I wanted the first draft done by Halloween. But it's at least a goal that will keep me moving towards finishing the first draft by 12/31. Even if she doesn't get polished enough to submit by 2/2/09, she'll still be pretty damn close. Case in point: Since NaNo ended, I've already written 5,038 words on IE and done some revision on the tenses that I mentioned earlier. That's pretty good, considering I took the first two days of the month off from writing.

So, there are my writing goals for the forseeable future. I'd love to including finishing Vaampyr in there, but I want to focus on IE first. I WILL work on Vaampyr whenever possible, like when I get burnt out on IE for the day. But IE is much closer to being done than Vaampyr, so it's my main concentration right now.

In the new year, I'd like to finish IE (totally), finish Vaampyr totally and give her a name, start my next novel (hopefully to be a series of novels), and complete at least one polished short story per month. Plus, shop those shorts around. Oh, and I'd like to revise the small stack of shorts I have ready right now, and shop them. AND, I'd like to get the rough drafts of my two Unfinisheds done.... it'll be a busy year, but I'm really getting into writing mojo lately so I think I can do it. Especially since I can't afford to be in school right now, so I have a lot more free time than I have in the last several years.

Nothing new besides all that. Still job-less, still school-less, still Lillie-less... and still pretty upset about all of that. But I'm writing, and that's really important to me right now.