OK, so I didn’t quite make my goal of having the novel done by the end of January. But I’m still writing it, and I’m still happy with what I’m writing.

The problem is that I keep coming up with just one more idea. “Oooh, I can…” or “Oooh, what if…” or “Oooh, maybe instead of…” My hope is that the novel will be stronger in the end. I also have a pretty good concept of the size of the editing task ahead of me. I have to plant seeds of all this stuff I’m adding at the end in the beginning so it’s not something I just sort of pull out of my butt at the last second. I won’t name titles, but we all know books like that. And we all hate them. I don’t want to be That Author™.

I’ve worked in all the disparate (as opposed to desperate, of which there might be an element, as well) pieces and am just about to wrap up the events that are happening in my hero’s future, but most of the novel’s present. Or past. Or…

Tenses are so weird when time travel is involved.

I expect I’ll finish it in another 3000 or so words. I’m at just under 86,000, now, which is close to where I thought it might end, so that wasn’t a bad guesstimate. I started writing the scene where all the “good” guys and the “bad” guys (they’ve all done questionable things, really, which is one of my Themes™, I think; no black or white, but shades of gray) are about to have their Group Hug™.

Well, not really, but that’s as good an explanation as I’ll give right now. :)

The end is actually in sight. I can almost smell the sweet, sweet aroma of “completed novel” wafting my way on the breeze. It smells like … victory. And nutmeg. But mostly victory.

Now, I’ll restate my associated writing goal, but with a little firmer date. Once this is done (probably in a few more days), I’m going to put it aside until April. I will then edit it with all my copious notes laid out before me. I don’t know how long it will take, because there’s quite a bit of…

You know how, when there’s an earthquake, you sometimes see pictures of roads that used to be one, contiguous path, but are now shifted anywhere from inches to yards out of alignment? That’s this story. I mean, even in places where I don’t want that to happen. (Time travel. Oy.) There are many places where the ends don’t meet, and I have to go back through, find them, and wrench them back into alignment.

So maybe April and May? Part of June? I don’t know: I’ve never edited a complete novel before. :)

I’mma say that one more time because I like the sound: complete novel.

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Project working title: Killing Time New words: 4,259 Current total words: 85,814 Goal: 100,000

Reason for stopping: Various, over the course of several days. Usually because lunch was over. :)

I haven’t written anything since the 6^th of January. Why? Because I got stuck. I knew what scenes needed to come up, but I needed a way to get out of the story, gracefully.

The problem with time travel stories is this: what’s to stop a character after the story is “over” from going back to undo the entire thing and thus negating the entire sequence of events? Since the life of the main character has been presented in anything but chronological sequence, what constitutes an “ending”?

It was a thorny problem, and one I’ve been struggling with. But as it turns out, I left myself an opening way back on day two of NaNoWriMo. I had a somewhat sinister character that was sent back in time to cause havoc and later had her “die” (read: I forgot about her, and when I remembered her, I just had the other characters remark that they hadn’t heard from her in a while, and therefore she must be dead).

Now she gets to the be one who shoots the female lead character and the reason time travel is stopped, all in one fell swoop. It makes more sense in my head than it does written down here for those of you who haven’t read the story. Which is, you know…everyone.

My goal to finish this story was “before the end of January,” and that is looming next Monday. But I think I can do it. I wrote 78,000 words in 30 days. I can write 10,000 in a week. And if not, I can just travel back in time and…wait. I think I’m getting too close to the story.

After this one is over, I have three short stories I’d like to finish and another new one I want to write in its entirety. Two of the four are werewolf stories (not sexy werewolves), another is a comical first-contact story told from the viewpoint of the aliens, and the new one is set in the same universe as my urban fantasy novels Perdition’s Flames and Death Scene, excerpts of which are available at the top of the page, if you so desire. The short will tell the story of how Nick, the main character, came to realize he had magical powers. I can’t wait to start it, which means I have to hunker down and get Killing Time done.

But right now, I’m off to my regular Tuesday night critique session with the other Fountain Pen members.

Project working title: Killing Time New words: 1,938 Current total words: 81,555 Goal: 100,000

Reason for stopping: Lunch was over.

Notes:

1. As I said above, I finally found how to “get out gracefully.” This is, after all, a story about time travel. How do you exit that gracefully, and make sure the story is over when it’s over?
2. Made copious notes on how to fill out this rediscovered character and make her be the fall guy (gal?) that is the catalyst for the climax of the story.

Tonight I wrote another 628 words on Killing Time, bringing my grand total to 79,617 words. It’s not a lot of progress in the scheme of how much I was making per day during November, but it’s not bad considering.¹

I think I have everything set up, now, for the next several “climactic” scenes, each taking place from a different POV or in a different time frame. Did I mention that Killing Time is a time-travel story set simultaneously in the present; multiple, parallel pasts; and the distant future? Well, it is. And keeping track of all that may prove to be too much for me, but we’ll see if I can pull all the threads together and make the ending a little less unsatisfying. That was one of the big complaints of the people who read it when it was a 12,000-word novelette. Too much exposition (for a 12,000 word story, probably 6,000 of that was exposition. <cringe> Exposition about how time travel works. <double cringe> Yeah. I know. I promise that ratio is much better, now. And the ending was anticlimactic. That was partly by design, and I’m keeping some of that, but adding more detail to clarify why it’s designed that way. Hopefully, my alpha readers will get it.

At least no one died in this scene. That’s a nice change. (No, really, that’s not facetious. I have a truly staggering body count in this one.)

There are between four and eight more scenes left to write, depending on how I feel when I start writing them. I have a lot of loose threads. If each scene is between 2500 and 5500 words long, I’ll crack 100,000 for sure.

Um, yeah. A chapter should be around 2500.

Well, we’ll see. :)

[Note: I’m experimenting with using a photo from Flickr that is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, but I’m not 100% sure exactly how to do that other than what I did, so I apologize heartily if I got it wrong and I will fix it if someone lets me know.]

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1. I have a bad respiratory infection, causing me to cough like mad, and the medicine is making me a little loopy.

Last night on Second Life at our regular Monday night meeting, The Quillians (the SF & Fantasy writing group I belong to) were discussing writing goals for 2011.

Ideally, these goals should stretch us as writers, but not be so bold as to be impossible. I mean, that’s the definition of a good goal, right? It’s all well and good to say “I’ll write four complete novels in 2011,” but it’s quite another thing to find the time—and the ideas—to do it.

I’ve taken a seminar on goal-setting. They stressed the importance for goals being SMART. That’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Well, the Measurable and Timely are already taken care of: Measurable = a finished project and Timely = by the end of 2011.

So I’m left with Specific, Attainable, and Realistic.

Specific is also pretty easy to do in writing. Specific for me will be either a novel, novella, novelette, short story, or flash. So that’s another one out of the way, and I’m left with Attainable and Realistic, which sort of go together.

For the last five years, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. The first two years, I crashed and burned because I didn’t have an idea what I was writing before I started. I foolishly thought I could just pound out 50,000 words in 30 days with no preparation. With no idea of a plot, characters, or setting.

Yeah. Right.

The last three years, I won¹ by completing 50,000 words in 30 days. All three times, I intimately knew my characters, setting, and where I wanted the plot to go. The rules say you don’t start writing the story until November 1: you can do as much preparation as you want before that.

This is where Attainable and Realistic come in. I know that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I know that, in fact, I can write 78,000 words in 30 days if I’m really motivated, because that’s how far I got in November of 2010.

But it really burns me out. I haven’t written but about 1000 words since November 30th. So being able to do a thing for a short while and being able to do it every day for a year are vastly different things. At 2,500 words/day, I could, conceivably, write 912,500 words before the end of 2011, but that would drive me clinically insane, I think.

So, that being said, here are what I believe are Attainable, Realistic goals:

• Finish my 2010 NaNoWriMo SF novel Killing Time by the end of January.
• Edit/rewrite Killing Time before the end of June.
• Finish my urban fantasy novel Perdition’s Flames by the end of June.
• Edit/rewrite Perdition’s Flames before the end of December.
• Write 15,000 words of new short fiction by June 30, 2011
• Submit at least one piece of short fiction for publication.
• Submit ~8000 words to Viable Paradise by June 15.
• Critique regularly for the Quillians, Lawrenceville SF & Fantasy Writing Group, and The Fountain Pen. (This is a gimme, since I already mostly do this, but I could do better.)
• Regularly submit for critique for all three groups.

When put down in writing, this doesn’t seem like a lot. But as of this entry, Killing Time is at 78,989 words and needs to be about 100,000. Perdition’s Flames is at 35,538 words, will probably be right at 50,000 or 60,000 when “finished,” and then must be edited to flesh it out to be about 100,000 words. And 15,000 words of new fiction in half of the year is kind of a group goal that we were challenged to take on by Sherry, one of the members of the Quillians. I have a good number of short stories that are either unfinished or need editing to be ready to submit. And one new short that’s clamoring to be written set in the same universe as my urban fantasy novels.

The two “submit” goals are the ones that are my “stretch.” I’ve never submitted anything to be published because I’ve never felt anything was “ready.” And so that’s where all the critiquing comes in. The only way I can know if I’m getting better is for people to tell me that the story is ready. Or not.

Three of the last four goals aren’t time-constrained because they’re not independent goals. They rely on the input of other people and the completion of other items, so it’s impossible for me to say “Submit a story for publication by March 1″ because I might not have anything ready by then. The Viable Paradise one is constrained because there is a deadline for submission. For those that don’t know, Viable Paradise is a week-long, residential writers workshop held on (in?) Martha’s Vineyard in the fall of each year. As a side goal, I’d like to read something by each of this year’s instructors, as well. Just to get to know their work.

So, anyway, those are my writing goals for 2011. They’re subject to change as situations change, but I hope that I will add to them rather than dropping any of them.

[Note: As an added comment: I first posted this using a Mac-based blog client called Blogo. It pretty much screwed the format, and will not be used again. Thank goodness for trial versions. I hope none of you saw the first version and were appalled.]

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1. You don’t actually win anything other than the satisfaction of having accomplished the seemingly impossible.

Used to be, I thought I only had one or two stories in me. That once I wrote them down, I’d be done, and could go back to mindlessly watching reality TV whilst eating Cheetos and drinking Coke Zero. Because, you know…that’s what you do. (Okay, that might not be what you (would) do, but I don’t drink alcohol, so Coke Zero’s about as strong as it’s going to get.)

I thought that eventually, the voices in my head (read: stories trying to get out, not schizophrenia; as yet the voices have never told me to kill anyone except my characters) would shut the hell up and leave me alone.

But that turns out not to be the case at all. Au contraire, chers lecteurs!

That turns out to be the farthest thing possible from ‘the case.’

I recently wrote my 2010 Writing Goals in the form of a short story. I use “short” here in the sense of “not a novelette, novella, or novel.” Sucker came out to 7000 words. Or so.

First, I went into the Place I Keep All My Writing™ and looked over all the stories and fragments thereof.

Then, in the goals story, I wake up to find all my characters from all my other stories have come to life and are inhabiting my house, with the implication being that they aren’t going anywhere until I get rid of them by finishing (and submitting) their stories. Between the tentacled alien in the shower, Death (incarnate!) in the closet, three time machines, several vampires, some angels, a murderer, and a few assorted fantasy creatures (I banished the centaur and faun to the back yard; the hooves were wreaking havoc on my hardwood floors), it was rather a full house.

I have three novels knocking on the inside of my head wanting to come out. One of those is clearly the first of a trilogy, and it has been knocking for some 20 years. Or more. I think the first seeds of it appeared in a horribly Mary Sue story I wrote when I was eleven. Yes, eleven.

The other two are the first two in a Dresden Files-esque series.

In a “sanity break” at work, I was just going through the application where I jot down story notes and ideas as they occur to me during the day and discovered ideas for at least two more novels in that series (Get a load of me, talking about a novel series and I haven’t even finished one of them, yet!), and that didn’t even go back past November of 2009.

In the goals story, I identified no fewer than 14 short stories in some form of completion and the three aforementioned novels. Those short stories range from ~1200 words to whoppers of nearly 20,000. Which is a novella, not a short story. (Over the years, my “short” stories have developed pituitary problems.)

And the funny part is, I managed to miss a few. I totally lost three novellas each of which I had written a good bit of. (Diagram that Grammar Nazis!) Can’t find ’em. Gone. Zip. Whoosh. Into the æthyr. (That’s writer talk for “it ain’t nowhere.”)

I guess the good news is this:

• I won’t run out of ideas any time in the next 70 or 80 millennia.
• I am getting better as a writer; I can tell by looking over some of those early stories that…basically, I sucked as a writer.
• I’m in no danger of becoming hooked on reality TV or Cheetos. (Coke Zero is already a lost cause.)

Unfortunately, the bad news is that

• There are so many stories fighting to get out, I don’t have time to work on them all.
• Any time I get the least bit bored or stuck with a story, I put it on ice and work on something else. Which is what got me into this situation in the first place.

But as far as real goals go, I made one. Or some. Depending on your viewpoint.

There are two writers workshops this year that sound like something I would really enjoy. One is called Taos Toolbox and the other is Viable Paradise. TT is two weeks in the desert in the summer; VP is one week on Martha’s Vineyard in the fall. I would be thrilled—THUH-RILLED—to be accepted to either one of them. Both have good instructors and involve a lot of intensive writing.

Toward that end, I’m working on the finished story that I think stands the best chance of getting me into one of them. The story was fully written and critiqued by my weekly writers group. I just never went back to it because in my mind, I was done with it. But after that goals story, I just couldn’t get the characters out of my head.

It’s a pure science fiction story with (what I hope is) an odd twist at the end. It involves time travel. I got it all edited and was done with the thing, then uploaded it to another writers group so they could critique it…and then read it again and noticed at least two plot holes large enough to drive Jupiter through. And at least three of its innermost moons. Without touching.

Unfortunately, said story is 11,500 words, and the limit for both TT and VP is 10,000. Hmmm. I smell editing in my near future.

I’ve already said a lot of this on both LiveJournal and FaceBook, but I thought it bore repeating. Because if I keep talking about it, I’m more likely to follow through.

Also, the deadline for the quarterly Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest is rapidly approaching (51 days, I believe), and that’s another potential submission destination for Killing Time (yes, the title blows goats).

So…I’m going to try to keep this more up-to-date as a “writing journal.” We’ll see how I do. :)

[Crossposted from my Blogger blog.]