Beautiful People #14 // Writerly Resolutions and Goals

Note: So yeah, at least for the time being, I’m going to start posting on Fridays now, as well as on Mondays and Wednesdays. It’s possible I won’t be able to do this consistently, but we’ll see how it goes. At least for now, Friday will be a random post day—anything from tags, to discussions, to book reviews, to whatever my Vulcan heart desires. Also, just so you know, this is my 100th post! Here, have some virtual coffee. (Also, I apologize for formatting strangeness--I just got a new computer and a new word processor, and I'm still working some of the kinks out.)

For those of you who aren't familiar with this link-up, Beautiful People is hosted by Cait @ Paper Fury and Sky @ Further Up and Further In. (You should definitely check out their blogs.) Last month I participated in Beautiful Books #3, and you can find the link to that here. 

What were your writing achievements last year? 

Last year was somewhat less productive for me than the year before. I started editing in January with high hopes of making good progress. Among my assorted rough drafts from NaNoWriMo 2015, I had written a trilogy, and I had worked up an editing timeline which I had hoped would help me completely polish that trilogy in a year and a half. (Yes, go ahead and laugh. It’s very funny. Ha ha.) But then snow happened. A LOT of snow. For a long while, the snowbanks at the ends of our wrap-around driveway were taller than me, and I’m no hobbit. This all meant I had to do a great deal of shoveling, and one of the side effects of intensive shoveling, for those of you who don’t have snow where you live, is exhaustion. So it was rather difficult to make editing headway during the winter, and starting out behind threw me off kilter for the rest of the year. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good year, I just didn’t feel as on top of my game as I did in 2014. That being said, I did manage to bring the first book in my trilogy to what I hope will be the next to last major draft. Yay me.

Tell us about your top priority writing project for this year? 

I’ve actually shared some snippets from my current project with you before (the links are here and here). Essentially, it’s a young adult fantasy with dragons and murder and revenge and other fun dark stuff. The main character has a hard time differentiating between acting out of love and acting out of selfishness, to put it mildly, which is probably my favorite type of person to write. I’m hoping to have that book ready to query by April at the latest. But I’m willing to take as much time as I need to get it right. 

After that, it’s a bit of a toss-up. I want to tackle my NaNoWriMo 2015 time travel novel, but I want to try editing two projects at once, to see if that’s something I can manage, so I’m going to need to pick another draft from Rough Draft Mountain (also known as my hard drive). And I hope to edit at least one more novel later on in the year, if I can possibly pull that off. *internal screaming* I’m leaning on targeting one of my historical novels set in the time of the first European Black Death outbreak, but I haven’t decided on what I’ll edit after that. Maybe I’ll draw straws, or stage a Rough Draft Hunger Games, or maybe I’ll have you vote. We’ll see. *twirls pen*

List 5 areas you’d like to work the hardest to improve this year. 

Um, obviously nothing because I am a perfect writer. 

Ahem. 

Just kidding. 

I definitely want to get better at the organizational side of things—I want to get more efficient so I can get more done. I have a lot of books I need to edit and a lot more that I really really want to write, so if I’m going to have my cake and eat it too, I need to step up the pace. 

I want to cut down on meaningless procrastination. I’m all for taking breaks from writing, but I don’t think it’s super helpful when my time off is unproductive and undisciplined. Facebook sucks my mental energy—so does Twitter. But, after writing something challenging or emotional, my tendency is to scroll mindlessly through my newsfeed so I don’t have to think. But I would rather spend that time researching or reading or painting or doing some other meaningful task. 

I want to convey emotion better in my writing. A couple of my beta readers have pointed out that my current main character acts out her emotions, but she doesn’t really seem to feel them. Granted, my goal for her is to communicate the way people reeling from trauma sometimes can’t feel very much at all and they just act out how they think they’re supposed to feel. But if I’m not getting the point across, I’m not getting the point across, and I need to address that. 

I want to improve the endings to my novels. I’ve never been hugely confident with them, and I want to work at making them snappier and more dramatic. Since I’m a panster, and I figure out my story as I go along, everything tends to fizzle out at the close. Which means, now that I’ve learned how to fly the plane, I need to learn how to land it. 

And finally, I want to improve my writing overall. While it’s important to focus on areas where my writing is weaker, that’s not hugely helpful when I forget to work on everything as a whole. So I want to make sure that no part of my craft gets neglected in favor of another. 

Are you participating in any writing challenges? 

Not currently. I will, however, participate in NaNoWriMo come November. I probably won’t do either of the Camp NaNoWriMos, mainly because I already have a boatload of rough drafts and I really should spend that time editing since I know I’m going to try to write 800,000 words in November. 

What’s your critique partner/beta reader situation like and do you have plans to expand this year? 

Right now, my system isn’t anything special. I just finish a draft, share it with random people I trust, and twiddle my thumbs until I get feedback. Then I edit and repeat. So I’ll be doing that again this year. 

Do you have plans to read any writer-related books this year? Or are there specific books you want to read for research? 

Currently, I don’t have any major plans. Last Christmas, my mom bought me a copy of LETTERS & LIFE by Bret Lott, and it’s about writing. I haven’t read it yet, but I really want to, so I’ll make sure to tackle that one this year. As for research, I don’t have any books in mind at the moment. 

Pick one character you want to get to know better, and how are you going to achieve this?

I want to get to know November (Ember—from my time travel novel) better because I find her rather interesting. She has this tiny bit of hope, and she’s letting it destroy her, and I want to explore her potential further. As for figuring out characters, I do that best as I work with them and put them in difficult situations. I’m not one for doing character charts and diagrams and whatnot. To me, those sorts of things are like tutorials for complicated software. I get bored and distracted so I skip them and poke around until I’ve figured out what I need to know. In other words, I learn by doing. 

Do you plan to edit or query, and what’s your plan of attack? 

I do plan to edit, and I do plan to query. My plan of attack can be summed up in one word: 

COFFEE

Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” What are the books that you want to see more of, and what “holes” do you think need filling in the literary world? 

Every book I write is something that I would have loved to have found on the shelves, so I guess you could say that those are the holes I perceive in the literary world, and I’m doing my best to fill them. 

What do you hope to have achieved by the end of 2016?

By the end of 2016, I hope to have finished editing my current work in progress and started querying agents for it. I hope to have brought two or three (or more) other manuscripts to that next-to-last draft stage. I also hope to have written 800,000 words. Oh, and a publishing contract would be nice. 

Well, that’s it, little coffee beans. What is your editing system? What are your writing plans for this year? Where do you hope to be by the end of 2016?