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Posts Tagged ‘new year’

Happy New Year

Here on the West Coast of the US, it’s about 2 hours til the new year. I accomplished a lot this year, though I fell short of some of my goals. But overall, I’m happy.

My New Year’s Eve present was four more rejections. I think my 2010 total is now about 158. Oh well, champagne is made for drowning rejections, right? (I don’t normally drink much, so it’s easy to drown me).

I managed to slip over the 400k words mark with a lot of work in the last few days, coming it at 406,127 words for the year. Not 450,000 but over 90% there, so I’m not going to be sorry about it.

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope that 2011 is a great year for all of us!

New Year, Specifically

So first, more info on my short story sale.  It’s to Alienskin Magazine and is (of course) a flash fiction piece.  I’ll be posting a link when it is up, which will be for their Feb/March issue.  I’m really excited.

Secondly, I figured I’d post a little more specifically on my goals for this year.

1. Write 4 novels and submit them

2. Have at least 30 short stories in my folders and keep them out on markets until they sell or have nowhere to go

So, both of these goals require writing more stuff.  I broke it down to wanting to write about 465k words this year.  Which seems like a huge number of words.  But if you break it down, it’s only 1,275 or so words a day.  Which would take me maybe an hour to an hour and a half to do.  Not so bad.  But…   I can’t write everyday.  That’s just not the way I or my life works.  So I decided I’d calculate what I need to write a week to reach my goal, which works out to about 9,000 words per week.  I can’t write every week either though, since stuff comes up or I go away places, etc…  So I decided what if I write 35 weeks (or so) out of the year? That gives me plenty of time off if I need it.  This works out to about 13,000 words per week that have to get done to meet my goal.

Then, I don’t write everyday, remember? I take weekends off most of the time.  13,000 words 5 days a week is 2600 or so words per day.  2-4 hours of writing a day, 5 days a week.  That, that I can do.  See? Now it’s manageable.

I think I’ll start… Monday 🙂

New Year: Writing Resolutions

It is technically the start of year 2 in the 10 year 10 novel plan.

I won’t say I’ve failed so far. While 2008 didn’t entirely go as planned, I did manage to get more writing done than ever before in my life. On various projects I’ve written over 150k words this year counting editing and rewrites. I hope to double that this year.

2009 will hopefully look like this:

I’ve submitted the first three chapters of Casimir Hypogean and Bladebearer to the writing workshop at Norwescon. This will be my first non college work-shopping experience.

I’ve edited and polished my two submissions for Clarion West and have only to format and send them in. If I get in, awesome. If not, at least I tried.

I’m going to finish the rough draft of Chwedl, edit it, and prepare a synopsis and query for it. This will officially be my first of the 10. Actually selling the novel or getting an agent is out of my hands, but my goal is to begin the process and not give up until I get there (which might take years, I accept that).

I’m going to finish Casimir Hypogean this year, at least the rough draft.

I’m going to write 5 more short stories.

I’m going to find homes for the 6 short stories I already have that I think are marketable.

I’m going to finish and polish A Prince Called Courage and set the novella aside until I can find a market for it.

These are my goals for 2009. Perhaps ambitious, but I don’t feel they are unreasonable.

Happy New Year!