Writing 2014

I've decided to make a concerted attempt to revive my blog, so I'm going to ease myself into it with an update on how my writing is going and what I'm working on in 2014 (February isn't too late to post a plan for the year, is it?)

Blood Rails
I initially started working on this novel as my project for Holly Lisle's How To Think Sideways course, but at the time I was studying and my CFS was pretty bad, so I made slow progress. In the first couple of years I wrote about 10k words. I used this for my NaNoWriMo in both 2011 and 2012 and added another 25k words. Then I hit a brick wall. The initiating event for the story was the main character's best friend being fatally injured, but the story ultimately wasn't about that, so I never really dealt with it properly. And my main subplot was way more interesting the main plot. And my main character didn't really do much except to sit around and watch other people do things. And... honestly I have no idea how I managed to write over thirty thousand words of this book before I realised how badly it was broken, except that I was fed up with how many half-finished projects I have and was determined to finish a first draft for once. I think there's some salvageable stuff in here, but I need a little more space from it before I work on it again.

Reading the Rosaries
This started off as my NaNoWriMo project for 2007, but I was working full time so I never got many words on it, and I was never entirely happy with it. But after Blood Rails didn't work out, I decided to pick this up again. I did a complete re-outline using the Snowflake Method and started a fresh first draft for NaNoWriMo 2013. It was a busy month for me so I didn't get anywhere close to 50k words, but I did manage to write every day, which made me realise that writing a hundred words a day is going to get the first draft finished a lot faster than writing a couple of thousand words every couple of months. So I'm taking a slow-but-steady approach and should have the first draft complete by the end of the year.

Millennium Child
This was my NaNoWriMo project in 2006. I used the Marshall Plan for writing it, and ended up with my most successful NaNoWriMo to date. I didn't quite finished the first draft during November itself because I went away at the end of the month, but I finished the first draft, at around 45k words, soon afterwards. And then the project languished for a long time while I decided what to do with it. Finally I decided to do the revision using Holly Lisle's revision course. And after four years I'm still stuck on the first week of the course. Mostly because the same kind of procrastination that affects me when I'm writing a first draft hits me doubly hard when I'm trying to revise. But breaking it down into tiny bite size pieces seems to be working for me at the moment, so I'm hoping to finally make it through the first week in the next month or two. And once I'm through the first week hopefully I'll be motivated to pick up the pace a little.

I have a heap of other partially-written and then abandoned stories on my computer, but unless I hit the wall again with either Reading the Rosaries or Millennium Child I intend to just focus on those two projects for the rest of the year, and hopefully make some real progress on both of them. Fingers crossed...