November Things, 2017

October felt like a month of retrenchment, trying to reestablish habits disrupted by illness and loss.

Three Things for October

revise Song – last month I felt I was close on the prologue, and I received good feedback on it, but it is still far too long. I need to try and tighten things up quite a lot.
short fiction – I wanted to complete 2-4 stories, writing at least 500 words a day. I certainly wrote 500 words a day (my average was 690 a day, in fact) and I got to the end of one story, but the second one is only half way done. I have a complete outline, though, so that’s something. I will finish that in December.
NaNoWriMo planning – I decided to work on a new story project for NaNoWriMo, but to limit my daily word count to only the nominal target. I intend to spend the other hour a day I would usually put into word generation on revising Song. This doesn’t feel intrinsically any more difficult than writing two novels at a time as I did the other year.
Turns out that NaNoWriMo is a hard thing to give up.Unfortunately, I was ill on the last day of October so the prep I wanted to do for NaNoWriMo was not quite completed. Fortunately, I know that if I spend the first day on chapter outlines (which is all that remains) then I will have no trouble getting the chapters written.

I’m going to call that two out of three. Only the Song revision really stalled, so that’s something I need to refocus on.

And that, basically, is what I am going to use the November energy to do.

Two months left of the year. How close am I on any of this?

finish A Turquoise Song – ideally I would be done with the third draft, but progress is being made and I am quite pleased with what I have. So, just need to get it done.
talk to some agents, aiming to obtain representation – further work pending manuscript completion.
investigate producing Livia as an audiobook – no further work. This might end up being something I work on over Christmas, or I will just have to push it back to next year.

What of November?

NaNoWriMo – 50,000 words, rapid.The story is called Disconnected. It is a sequel to The Manx Connection, and follows the same MC (albeit with a better name) after he has lost his magic and his memory. As I noted above, I intend to stick to the nominal target over the month — my daily word count target is still 2,000 words, but I only plan on writing for 25 days.
revise Song – continue revising the third draft. This seems lunatic in November, but since I usually write about 75k in a typical November and only plan on writing 50k or so this year, I intend the other 25k’s worth of time will be devoted to this revision process.

November is about finishing my shit, which means there are only two things on the list.