Monday, February 22, 2010

Day 38 - Looking Ahead

Suffering from the usual Monday exhaustion. I did spend a little time rethinking and taking notes on how my new material effects several other things. I may have to change the location on some scenes, because I don't want to burn my steps on some of my best ideas too early.

Otherwise, I'll just take a moment to look ahead and then go to sleep:

21 days left to the Dare. And 33000 words to go. I'm not likely to make that, although the last week will be a Spring Break, and so you never know. Because I have had a couple of great epiphanies, I expect to be slowed down by some changes too.

But I do think that I will have a "whole" story. It may not be finished -- there may be skeletal scenes, placeholders, and even some missing scenes, but the story will all be there, with its mode and flow, to be looked at as a whole.

On March 15 (The Ides of March!) I will set aside the book, no matter where it's at, and devote time to reading (reporting progress as I go). I have a huge stack of books I haven't got to, but one thing I really want to do is read more short stories again. Because....

On March 20, I will begin working on short fiction. I'm going to do one week of idea generating (15 ideas a day, developing 1-2 to writeable stage each day) and then one week of writing on the ideas, then one week of idea generating, and another week of writing. Then a week or two of picking and polishing the most marketable and sending them over the transom again.

When the semester is over in May, I will go back and rewrite the novel. At that point I may start looking for a few new readers. Summer will be a big deal again, this year, and I'll talk about that more later.

No comments: