New Year’s Resolutions!

Now, while some people are already in 2008, I’m stuck in 07 for another 12 hours or so. And boy am I ending the year on a high note! (/sarcasm). I have got a stinking cold and have been up for most of last night trying to find some way to fall asleep. Really weird dreams, too, though that’s been more or less a constant lately (maybe another post on that later). Anyway, if I end the year badly, surely that means I get good things in the year to come, right? Right?

And I’m struggling to stay on schedule with my rewrite. Being at home with the family takes vast amounts of my time that would otherwise be occupied by writing. I’m used to sitting down and writing 5000-10000 in one giant stretch. Now I’m being forced to get down 500, or maybe 1000, before I’m called back downstairs to play this game or that game. I’m taking the day off today because I’m so sick that I can’t even summon up much energy to open the Word document. God knows how I’ll stay up another 12 hours. Alcohol, maybe.

So, new year’s resolutions.

1. Finish my rewrite, edit it and submit to at least ten agents/publishers

2. Get a summer internship

3. Find time/money to go to Texas to the boyfriend.

4. Others that I’ve not yet thought of as I’m too sick to think.

Happy New Years, all!

And that’s it!

Done my finals, done all the work I need to do. Even bought wrapping paper on my way home so that I can wrap the presents that have been sitting in the corner of my room for the past week.  Still plenty I need to do before I can go home (clean this place up, do the dishes, think about doing some laundry), but I feel kind of empty after having spent the past 72 hours or more with my mind completely focused on studying (I’ve had three finals in the past 48 hours). I feel like, instead of sitting here and writing this post, I should be studying.  Instead, I’m done until the middle of January.  Time to get on with all those things mentioned in the last post.

By the way, I’ve decided that I’m going to push through on Kuklos over the break and leave the mortal gods until whenever I feel like going back to it. I know if I do that, I’ll just give myself a nervous breakdown, and who needs that over Christmas?

Out with the Old, In with the new?

Well, the end of finals is coming up (and right now I’ve got my psych textbook propped up next to me), and that means the beginning of Christmas break and oodles of free time. While there are other things I need to get done over break (broadly speaking, I need to learn all the Russian that I’ve neglected to learn over the past five semesters, and quite possibly do some boning up on economics…if I’m going to be a proper political science major, I should at least know the basics, right?), what I really wanted to get done was a good chunk of writing. The original plan was to re-write Kuklos, as it’s by far my favorite of my Nano projects and by far the one that I think I can turn into something publishable. I’ve even started a new outline for it, and was fully committed to getting it done.

Then something happened. I’d been letting people read what I affectionately call my novel-from-hell, the piece of work that has been plaguing me for so long it’s ridiculous. So, I got back a review from someone that had read it. It was harsh, but deservedly so. I’m far too attached to the damn thing to see the flaws, and it’s been hashed together from so many different sources that there are all kinds of random things shoved in there simply because they were there before and make very little sense in the present version.  Basically, it needs completely re-doing as well.

The question thus becomes, which of these two projects do I tackle? Do I go back to the old project that I’ve rewritten half a dozen times and see if this time it comes out better? Or do I go to the new one, the one that stands a hope in hell of being something decent, whereas I’m not entirely convinced the old one will ever be good enough for me? Agh, the choices.

On a completely unrelated note, I have discovered how much I love cryptograms.

TGIO?

I love writing and I flatter myself that I’m fairly good at it, for a young person. Don’t get me wrong there.

But sitting down every day, day after day and writing 15,000-30,000 words almost every day for 30 days really took a lot out of me. By the last week, I was sitting there and forcing myself to get the words out, making ever more elaborate ploys to keep me writing. (At the beginning of the month, it was 500 every ten minutes or even 1000 every 15, which turned into 333 every 6, which turned into 250 every 10).

I’m used to setting grueling schedules for myself, writing-wise, but I have to say that 30 days of this was really far too much for me, especially as the proceeding months, I’d been doing very little writing, and certainly nothing at that kind of pace. That’s something I need to think about well in advance of next November, when I decide what my target is for next year.

Another thing I’m not going to miss – hand/wrist/arm pain. In the second week or so, I got extraordinary hand/wrist pain, which is why if you look at my stats, you see my wordcounts a lot lower that week than they were every other week. I bought wrist braces which are now somewhere on my desk. Over Thanksgiving, I worked without them and I’ve managed to strengthen my wrists/hands/arms through use rather than destroying them, apparently (as I’m typing this without any pain or difficulty). The last few days, I got occasional shooting pains, but I wrote an average of 25,000 every day for four days, so I suppose that’s to be expected. But as of now, no pain at all. So that’s good. I’d have been bummed more than words could describe if I’d ruined my wrists.

But I’ll miss it all the same. I’d never have pushed my way through to 500,000 if I hadn’t had something to give me a reason to. I’m pretty pleased with most of what came out, too, which is also a plus.

It’s why I’m glad there’s a Nanowrimo.

The Next Steps

Well, I’ve decided that while I have vastly more important things to do (like dealing with the end of the semester), I’m going to pull my personal favorite of the lot (Kuklos) through to a publishable size novel. I’m envisioning it being somewhere between 90k-100k, and hoping to have that finished by the middle of January when I come back here for the spring semester.

My other pet project,  The Mortal Gods, which is something I’ve had in the works in one form or another since I was 13, is still demanding my attention. I think it’s about as solid as it can be and I just need to figure out the right way to query it. I’ve had 4, I think, rejections for it so far, but I’m not giving up on it. I know that a first novel is often unpublishable, but this one’s gone so far since its conception that I don’t think it can even really be said to be the same novel as I wrote when I was a freshman in high school. But I’ll probably give it some attention over the next few weeks, too.

Also, as I’ve said on the NaNoWriMo site, I’m open to letting pretty much anyone read any of the previously mentioned novels because I think feedback is important, and as I’m going to be un-busy over Christmas and the weeks following it, I’d be happy to  return the favor or critique a story you’d like me to take a look at (personal specialties: thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy).

As for the rest of my projects? Well, two of them I really don’t like the way they turned out, and so I’ll probably leave them to rot. My fantasy novel, Games of Mind and Sword, I might try rewriting before next November so I can do a sequel then, but that’s way too far ahead to think about.