January Dare - the Smaller Goals

Okay, here we go! It's a whole new year. And as I said, you ain't heard nothin' yet.

Yesterday and today I went through Harsh Climate and took notes toward some areas that needed more serious work, and otherwise edited about half of it.

I liked what I saw. I think I achieved my goal to make the reading experience like watching a movie -- it's fast paced and action oriented, but has enough description and internal voice of the characters that it doesn't feel dry. I suspect the ending will need a little extra work, though. I want to get this finished by Friday, and then I'll send it off to a friend who does light proof-reading. (She charges by the mistake, though, so I've got to proof a couple of times first.)

Once I've sent it off, I will start in on the real Dare for the month. It will be 23 days from the 8th to the 30th. I'll be working on Old Paint: Dead or Alive, which is the second novel in the Mick and Casey Mystery series.

I have a lot of material already written, maybe as much as 20,000 words or more. But it's in disorganized notes and scenes, and will take some effort to get it back in shape. Therefore I'm going to write this as if from scratch.

The goals for this January dare will be 30,000 words on this novel. Which is about 1300 words a day. That shouldn't be too hard to achieve given that I have a lot of material already written.

I updated my Dare Goals Page today also, to include my publishing schedule for the first half of the year. I'll talk about those goals one month at a time.

In the meantime, I'm also using this overall publishing effort to take part in Dean Wesley Smith's eRace. You could call that a different kind of dare, where you get points for outcome - that is when you publish something. I'm not sure I agree with their point system, so I'm going to keep two tallies - theirs and one of my own which will be based on price of the published book.

To start the year, I have 21 points in the eRace - 3 novels and 2 short collections. (By my dollar total, I have 11 points.) I will post updates on this once a month, along with earnings and raw sales numbers.