As crazy as it is to say this, my very first draft of my very first novel is done. I wrapped up the story last Sunday evening right at 85k words. Is it any good? Well, no, to be honest, it's not. But I think it does have some interesting things going on and some potential so we will see what I can make of it. For the time being, I've put it aside - it's been double-triple saved and spell-checked but that's all I'm doing until I'm ready to start editing in a few weeks. When will that be exactly? When my brain has finally stopped obsessing about it - an idea or twist or something still pops in my head from time to time, and I dutifully note it down for my future edits, but until those stop, I'm not going to pick it up again.
Why am I doing this? Excellent question, not sure I have a good answer though. My knee-jerk reaction is that it is so I have enough distance from it to read it as a reader who's reading what's on the page, rather than as the writer who knows what I wanted to convey. Having gone back and read things I've written in the past, I know that the distancing makes it easier for me to be objective in what is working and what is not; almost as if I'm reading someone else's work. The hope is that this distance and clarity will make the editing that much more effective. In the meantime, I've had some great revelations in terms of what I'm working on going forward. I HAD intended to jump into my urban fantasy piece, but while I've got some ideas on the overall plot and a few of the characters, I wasn't particularly excited about the project. I have been struggling to settle on a tone and voice for the whole thing - is it straight urban fantasy? Darker? Comedic? It changes a lot of things depending on which direction I want to go so don't want to start down the wrong path. I still think the project has merit, but I don't think now is the time for me to tackle it. I think it'll keep. Instead, I'm going to work on a serialized fantasy epic based on a game we did ages and ages ago, called the Queen's Hunt. This will give me the opportunity to work on a strong plot-driven story, with a smaller story arc in each release and developing character arcs over the whole thing. I'm leaning towards having each chapter/release told exclusively from the point of view of one character, then changing to another in the next release, so that should be fun. Right now, I'm working on brainstorming the characters I want in my group, the tasks they are going to have to take on in each novelette and how I want them to grow over the course. I'm going to TRY and have a over-arching outline for the series, the first novelette outline, plus rough character sketches for each by the end of June. That's plenty of time, even with five protagonists, plus a couple antagonists, and twelves tasks to complete. Plus, throughout that time, I have to do a lot of world building and come up with the text for the challenge they are going to be tasked with. Whew! Finally, in searching for notes from yesteryear for this new project, I stumbled across a NaNo urban fantasy piece that I really wanted to return to and had thought I'd lost. Nope, it was buried in my Google Drive (which I strangely never look in - I use Dropbox for personal stuff). I haven't read over anything, but am looking forward to seeing what is worthwhile from there in the future. In the meantime, I've started posted weekly goals in a couple of my social media groups to try to keep me focused on not only writing, but also on my education as a writer on any number of topics (writing, editing, publishing, marketing, etc) and yet not get overwhelmed by books to read, webinars to watch, conversations to follow and emails to open. It's been both helpful and stressful - helpful in that it's kept me from diving too deep down a rabbit hole; stressful in that twelve goals in seven days, while still working full-time might have been a bit much to chew; and generally educational as I ended up forgetting to put the fact that I'm listening to a rather long audio book on writing on the list, and then started a few other projects that weren't on the list at all. Hopefully, all this means that I'll have a little better idea of how to craft my goals this next Monday when it rolls around. I'm not going to meet all of my goals for the week, but I think that's ok, as long as I keep striving forward. Happily, this post checks another off my list so, Yea me!
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