Jack of Many Trades

New Year's (Writing) Resolutions

Originally posted: 2010-01-02

According to Daytum, I cracked the 90k mark with my second Yuletide story. That's less than I had hoped for, but not too bad considering that I had a lot less time to write at work this year and a fair amount of personal upheaval.

Looking ahead to next year, though, I want to set my sights a little higher. I don't want to pick something that I'll give up on in February the way I did last year, but I want something that will challenge me every month.

At the TGIO party for NaNoWriMo, one of my fellow writers mentioned that he'll be attempting 10k a month next year. That seems extremely reasonable - about 2500 words a week, and I know I can do that. Assuming I'm going to do NaNo again next year as well, I'm looking at 160k next year. (That's 11 months of 10k and one month of 50k. If I decide to do one of the other mad rush writing events as well I'll take that into account when I get there.)

How am I going to do it? In stages.

First, I am still wrapping up Sic Transit Fidei, so that's going to get me through the first few weeks. Then I'm going to do some work on the Forgotten City project, mostly in the form of encyclopedic writeups, to see if I can shake loose something there. In the meantime, I'm going to work up a query letter for my NaNo novel, Starlings, and start revising that. If nothing from Forgotten City takes off, I'll be working on an Epsilon Tales story next and I may post some side-stories for Starlings.

Or, you know, that may all go out the window in a week. We'll see.