plans Archives - Annie Bellet

Posts Tagged ‘plans’

September and Sundry

September was a stressful month. I was still recovering from the summer and Clarion (and all the other travel I did). I was also doing a lot of sitting around and trying to figure out what I should be writing and where my energy should be going. I think I’ve got that sorted at least, though it means writing in other genres. Science Fiction just doesn’t have the large readership I want to tap into, so I’m expanding my horizons and testing new waters.

Ebook sales started out amazing and then died off almost completely until the very end of the month. I don’t know why but I wasn’t the only one seeing the Kindle sales fall like a stone, so who knows. I put up another short story collection and a novel in a different genre under a pen name. Over the next six months or so I’ll be putting up quite a bit of work under pen names, so Annie Bellet probably won’t have much new (other than The Raven King which is coming this winter at some point, I promise). My Clarion project book is also in the works and that will be up in the next month or two.

Here are the stats, such as they are:

Ebooks sold: 102

Paper books sold: 0

Words written: 11,206

In other news, Daily SF got SFWA qualified, which means that if I can scrounge up 80 bucks, I, too, can be a full SFWA member. At the moment I’m super broke, so I won’t be joining. But I will before WorldCon next year, probably, even though I’m more or less leaving NY publishing behind and focusing my efforts on publishing my own work. I am still going to write and (hopefully) sell stories to magazines, so it might be useful to be an SFWA member. We’ll see.

I will be a panelist at the Portland, OR convention Orycon. I’ll post my schedule closer to the convention.

So that’s the news with me lately. Chapters of Casimir Hypogean will still go up each Monday and I have many new victims for my Neo-pro Interview series, so look for those on Thursdays.

Now that that’s over…

Home from the Dean Wesley Smith novel workshop. Two query packages are in the mail, three more will follow those as soon as I unpack and transfer the right files to the right computer and update all my folders.

Once again, learned so much at the workshop that I can’t even begin to sum it up. Re-affirmed that ebooks are a good idea (balancing with NY publishing), and learned great things about POD stuff that I hadn’t even started to investigate on my own yet. Having a professional, proofed query package is a great benefit of the novel workshops, but the real meat of learning at these things is in all the side information, the stories, the questions that others ask and answer, and so many other little details (not to mention the cool people I meet and the books I get to read…).

But now, it means I’m done with that novel until I get a full request. So what’s next? Well, here’s the rough plan for the rest of this year:

Plan for rest of October: write a handful of short stories and mail them. Get the world-bible nailed down for my ebook project. Keep things in the mail.

Plan for November: Write the ebook project book 1 as a nanowrimo (hey, why not, right?) and start back in on TVMoSS as soon as that’s done. Also write another handful of short stories and mail them.

Plan for December: Get ebook novel ready for launch in Jan. Finish TVMoSS (or as near as I can given I’m going to lose a lot of time due to holiday stuff). Write another handful of short stories and mail them.

It looks like a lot, but Oct/Nov are usually fairly productive times for me, so I’m not too worried. I just need TVMoSS done by Feb 1st, and the ebook book 1 done by December-ish (to get time to edit, clean it up, and format before Jan.).

So yeah, that’s about it. I’m planning a post on my library project, so hopefully now I’m done with that mind-eating novel I’ll get something up on this blog that’s at least nominally interesting on a more regular basis. Thanks to everyone who encouraged and supported me while I struggled through finishing this last month or so, you guys are awesome!

Forward at Last!

My computer is all set up and my writing rescued from the old, corrupt hard-drive. Which means I now have access to my novel. Which means no more excuses for not editing it.

I’m terrified of it not being good enough. I know it isn’t good enough right now. It’s not long enough, the writing is a complete mess in terms of grammar and consistency, and there is so much more telling than showing it’s sort of pathetic. I don’t know if I can fix it. If the bones aren’t good, what’s the point right? In the 2008 Writers’ Market for Novels and Short Stories there is an article about how to know when something is no good and when to move on to the next project. It’s where I first got the idea for the ten novels in ten years. And I know in my head that it isn’t done. There is a decent story here, there are characters I kind of like sometimes.

The problem is that this novel is my Frankenstein. Not the book, the monster. It’s the first. My original baby that I threw together from bits and pieces I could find laying around. A bit of a bad spy novel I read once, a couple characters from an old Shadowrun game, a villain right out of one my dreams, a mall fight scene because I thought it would be cool. It’s a patchwork novel, a strange creature built from cut corners and stolen inspirations. And to make it acceptable, to make it truly mine, I can’t just put a pretty dress on it and send it to the ball. That is why this rewrite is going to be so much work. I have to tear into the structure and rework the very marrow of the stuff. There will be carnage.

Time to get it out of the way, however. I have to do this. So for my two hours a day I’m going to be reworking a chapter at a time of Dangerous. (God do I wish I had a real title for this, sigh). It might take me longer than two hours per chapter, it might not. I don’t really care. One chapter per day. This will only take at most 20 days, and that’s if I add chapters. I can’t remember where it stood exactly, but I think it’s only about 17 chapters long at this point.

Things I want to do to this novel besides burn all copies:

1) Fill out character backstories and motivations. It’s third person omniscient, so this should be fairly easy.

2) Add about 100 pages to the novel. I don’t think this will be difficult either.

3) More world description. Make the setting matter more and feel more oppressive and dystopian. Include more news casts and more camera/police presence. (I should watch more Fox news to get more ideas, heh).
4) More peril. Things in the novel are entirely too much on the side of my protagonists. They should work harder. It’ll be more interesting.

5) Rework pretty much all the writing. It’s super sloppy right now due to me trying to cram words in for the word count. Contractions are a good thing.

Those are the main things. If I manage to fix all those things, I think the end product will be something more like a workable draft. Then I can finally inflict it on my friends and mother. They keep asking about it, silly fools. Well, by the end of March they will have learned the error of their ways. Oh yes.

Stalling

The prelim work on my novel is done. All that remains now is to get writing. Beginnings are easy and hard. The first paragraph is always hard. After that, it comes on its own generally. I haven’t written that first paragraph.

On the other hand, I finally finished a story I’d been working on for four years. I’d gotten stuck at the halfway point, dreading a scene the story needed but that I wasn’t sure how to handle. After a friend lit a proverbial fire under me with a supportive but kicking my ass type of lecture this last weekend, I decided to just buckle down and finish it. It went pretty well, actually. Now I’ve got the fun task of editing it.

Speaking of editing, hopefully my new computer will be up and running soon so I can salvage my novel from the old one and get cracking on that. I’d like to have a comprehensive edit done by March. I’m not sure 28 days is reasonable but I need some sort of deadline or I’ll just keep putting it off forever.

And finally, I called the graduate program I applied to and they have everything they need. Which means now it really is the waiting game. Thankfully I have tons of projects to distract me. I hate wait.

Purpose! At Last!

I think I have something to blog about, finally. It seems a shame to let this little corner of the vast interwebs rot away into wherever abandoned things go.

I got the 2008 Writer’s Short Story and Novel Market Guide. In it one of the guest writers proposes that one should write a novel every year for ten years and then see where they are with the whole submission and publication thing. This idea is offered as a way to see if one is cut out for the publishing world as well as a way to know when to let a particular written baby climb out of the nest and fly (or fall to its doom).

So I’m going to do that. I’m going to write one novel per year for the next ten years. At the end of every year I’ll start the submission process and move on to the next novel. Considering I have at least 5 novel ideas in me already waiting, this won’t be too difficult to start. I think I’m going to make Jan 1st the date, for the sake of simplicity. However, this first year I have to finish editing my first novel, but I’m going to try to write and edit the second by the 1st of 2009.

So this journal will be for that process. I’m going to try to document ideas, ups, downs, and all the fun in between. Hopefully in ten years I can read back through this and laugh because I’m a selling writer. We’ll see.

Good luck to me.