A.J. Walker

writerer

November Writing Project

There was the little decision earlier in the week not to drop in and try a second NaNoWriMo. It was a pretty easy call to make without any plan in place and more pertinently a lack of surety of my available time this month. The writing projects I had in mind at the start of the year have stalled and are still in sight of the starting blocks. Rather than invent yet another goal (to complete NaNo) I have decided to get back on to one of the original projects and after a little deliberation I have decided that it will be: Project 1 - A Short Story Collection. Let's face it, it shouldn't have taken too much thought to come up with doing the damn things in the order I came up with them!

Project 1 is a series of 12 short stories, initially aimed at being between 1500-3000 words each, that's a total of 18k-36k. Given I've done two already then that means probably about 1000 words a day if I aim to do them in November - or a short story ever two days or so (compared to a consistent 1667 a day to do NaNo).

In terms of achieving 12 stories that work, are independent of each other and stand up the key thing in such a short space of time will be the number and depth ideas. So this month driving time = ideas time.

Of course whilst this is to some extent to replace NaNo as a driving force to complete a 'work' it's not like I won't have achieved anything if I don't finish them all by the end of the month; I'm not going to issue myself with an internet Badge for completion or reward myself with a T-Shirt. If it goes over by a week or even more then so be it. But the main thing is to drive something forward and to at least attempt to complete one of the goals I set myself at the start of the year.

bridge
Not crossing that bridge, yet.

The ultimate aim will be to get 12 stories together that I am happy with and that I can self publish some time in the new year. It'll probably just be Kindle, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Then again if I have 12 stories I'm happy with then maybe I'll just have a bank of 12 stories I can submit to publications... Anyway, like I say, get over that bridge when I get to it.

blog comments powered by Disqus