December has arrived, and as we near the end of the year, I always start to wonder what I want to do next year, and how I can get around to getting it done. So I figured I could give some insight into what I had in mind for 2015, how it panned out, and how I revise my plans as I go along.
The Start of the Year
Publish Viral Airwaves: by the end of 2014, I was waiting on revisions for Viral Airwaves and knew it’d be out within the first two months of the year. Since this was my first publishing experience, I put everything else on hold until it was done. I figured, working hard, I could have another book out before the year was over. With my Masters going, though, I decided not to make a solid plan until I knew how much time that’d take.
Then my publishers asked if I had novella material I could publish alongside Viral Airwaves, and I did. I spent the rest of February and part of March rewriting The White Renegade, and we put out Seraphin’s backstory as soon as we could.
Planning for City of Spires
I’ve known I wanted to work on City of Spires (Isandor) for a long time now, and I jumped back into it after. I knew two things:
- I wanted to write all three drafts of the trilogy before I published the first.
- I didn’t want it to take years before I was ready to publish again.
So I wanted my drafts as quickly as I could make it, to allow me to estimate revision time. My original plan looked like:
- Finish Isandor1 by April 30.
- Finish Isandor2 by July 31 (writing from June 15 to July 31).
- Finish Isandor3 by September 30.
In comes Wings of Renewal
As with all best laid plans, this one quickly got disturbed. Somewhere in May (I think), we came up with the Wings of Renewal idea. So I made time for it, clearing everything out of my August schedule. I thought a month would be enough (haha .. ha).
As it turned out, it took a lot of my time in the second half of July (as I read submissions), all of August, and most of September. I still managed to finish Isandor2 in time, but I obviously wouldn’t do Isandor3 before the end of September.
I figured, hey, I can still make it before NaNoWriMo starts. It implied 2000-2500 words a week, but I’d done that over summer. I could!
Spoilers: it didn’t work out. And I want to talk more about it soon, because there’s a lot of advice about writing everyday, writing a lot, pushing through blocks and etc. And while that actually fits me well, 1) it’s not true for everyone, and 2) it can get unhealthy fast.
So, next post? Isandor3 and writer’s fatigue. Then we can move on to what I have in mind for 2016!