Amanda Frederickson's Blog: Musings - Posts Tagged "goals"

First, a moment. *Squee!* I have an author blog! *Dance dance dance.*

Ok. The theory here is that the more people I tell about my goals, the more driven I'll be to accomplish them. Couldn't hurt, right? Especially this year, because I've got some whopping goals.

The Big Hairy Ambitious Goals for 2013? Three books. Yup. Three whole books ready for print, one way or another. Not just any books either.

I currently have two manuscripts in the works: The Masquerade and Kingstone. Masquerade is a fantasy epic with a little intrigue and a lot of romance (or should that be the other way around?). It's literally the longest manuscript I've ever written and might as much as double before I'm finished revising it. Kingstone is book two in the Gatewalkers trilogy and it's about halfway through its first draft.

The goal is to revise Masquerade, finish Kingstone's first draft and revise/polish it, and after that write almost the entirety of Cornerstone (book three, Gatewalkers), revise and polish it before the end of the year.

It's already halfway through February.

Apparently 2013 is just the year for ambitious goals, because the three book goal has turned into a four book goal (sort of).

This year for Camp Nanowrimo (campnanowrimo.org) the folks at the Office of Letters and Light added a new feature: custom word count goals. You can now set your goal to anything from 10,000 to 100,000 words. After much, much consideration and debate, I decided that this chance should not be wasted on the mere 30,000-ish of Kingstone's ending. (Ok, so it was also an excuse to procrastinate the actual writing of said Ending of Doom.)

Instead, I decided to jump sideways to a "little" project that has been swimming around in the back of my head. It's still part of the Gatewalkers universe - in fact, I've thought of a way to tie some lurking foundation into Kingstone - but it's a separate story. I haven't yet figured out a way to summarize the concept in a way that doesn't sound fluffy (which is funny considering the copious amounts of blood I'm planning), but the working title is *drumroll* Rose Among Thorns.

I know, there's a thousand other books with the same title. It's changing eventually. But for a working title it should do just fine.

I've set the word goal for 80,000 words, which should be a solid reading size for it. I have the plot arc more or less planned out, with wiggle room for surprises and development, and I've been given a challenge for it: a love triangle.

I hate love triangles. I could probably write pages about why. I also know there are readers who adore love triangles. The challenge will be making it work so that both readers and I will be happy with it. Hopefully this will be some good stretching for my writing muscles.

In the meantime, I haven't forgotten Kingstone. Camp's starting line is April 1st, so until then my plan is to type in all of what I have handwritten of Kingstone, including all the bits and pieces that somehow ended up spread across a dozen notebooks. Ideally, that means I'll be ready to face the Ending of Doom after camp.

A little like being ready to jump off a cliff into freezing cold seawater with jagged rocks hiding beneath the surface.

I know, I know. I've been in "hide from the world" mode. *Stretch.* July turned out to be a busy, busy month, with a whirlwind of curveballs like leaking ceilings, car break-ins and friends in crisis (not to mention July Camp Nanowrimo).

Despite this, Kingstone is at a healthy fighting weight of 65,000 words and change, Cornerstone is three chapters further along (with more rolling along nicely), Masquerade's knottiest problem has been unknotted with a bit of timeline work and some key scene revisions, a writing contest has been added to my full plate (basic world building, character foundations and tentative outline already worked out), and a custom jewelry project finished, shipped, and awesome. That's right, all three of 2013's book projects have made significant progress, overcoming debilitating blocks. Ha! Take that, July!

Not a moment too soon, either, because Neko-chan threw out her back again and is on reduced mobility, which drives her crazy because she's such an active person. It's now my personal mission to ply her with new reading material to keep her occupied until the doctors can do the surgery that should fix her up.

...For Nanowrimo.

The official November National Novel Writing Month is sneaking up and I have been pondering possibilities. Possibilities are being pondered. Questions are being posed. Projects are being questioned.

Moreover, there is a freshly minted stack of library books that is taller than my bed. My arms were not happy but my reading bug is gleeful.

Research is happening.

Don't worry, Kingstone hasn't been forgotten. But I might be doing something a little different for Nanowrimo 2013.

Stay tuned....

Here's what's happening. I've been participating in National Novel Writing Month for nine years now and since it's a non-profit organization I try to donate toward their operating costs when I can (they also run awesome things like the Young Writers' Program for kids and teens). Circumstances being what they are this year, I'm even poorer than usual and I'm not going to be able to make my usual donation.

So I'm going to see if I can kill several birds with one month.

Smashwords.com is going to be running a promotion for NaNoWriMo. Anyone who signs up will be able to "publish" their book as a work in progress as they write. Ordinarily I'd be running from this idea, screaming. Especially when it comes to self publishing, everything put out for the public consumption needs to be the best that it can be.

On the other hand, a freshly published author's worst enemy is obscurity. Marketing and book pitches aren't exactly my strong suit either; it's part of why I chose to self publish Keystone.

So, I decided to go for it and "publish" this year's Nano project as a sort of open beta read. It's going to be a "reader sets the price" option so if someone wants to contribute toward my Nano donation goal of $25 they can, otherwise they can read it for free. As a bonus for enduring the book's rough state, everyone who opts in for this experimental project will get the final, published work for the absolute bargain price of whatever they chose to pay for it.

However, being a work in progress, the Nano project may or may not contain things like this: [King Needsaname] [Dang, it's hard to type while eating][Why did I think this was a good idea?] [He needs to DIE]. Consider them bloopers. Behind the scenes commentary. The product of too much caffeine and sugar without adequate sleep. It happens a lot during NaNoWriMo.

I'd love for this to be an interactive experience, so readers can tell me what they'd like to see (or not see) as the book progresses, so to that end I'm going to be starting a Facebook author page, which I think is a little more easily accessible than Goodreads. Also I can post when there's a fresh updates without cluttering up this blog. I also have some cool bonus materials planned (Thanks Katrina Shelley for some great ideas!).

I'm really getting excited about this one, but I'm getting crazy nervous too. I've been getting perfectionistic in my old age, so the prospect of exposing my work before it's finished is very daunting. That's another bird I'm hoping to kill: the stark terror of showing my work to those outside my familiar circles.

Let's go bird hunting.

Coming next: project details and why this might be my best NaNoWriMo ever!

It's funny how October 31st is still one of my favorite days of the year, but not for entirely the same reasons. The costume and candy anticipation has turned to character and plot anticipation. Don't get me wrong, costumes and candy are still the highlights of Halloween, but on the stroke of midnight, like a reverse Cinderella's carriage, All Hallows Eve becomes Day One of National Novel Writing Month.

Magic hour.

I looked back over my past Nanowrimo books and realized this will be my tenth November Nanowrimo project (don't ask me how that math works out; nine years but ten books). It makes my plans all the more fitting.

Way back in 2004 when I discovered the madness that is Nano, I had two weeks to decide and plan my project. At that time my friends and I were very active role players and any given free time that found a handful of us together resulted in random "moshes," in which each of us picked a character and someone picked a setting. With nothing more than that we built amazing stories together.

One stormy evening found a few of us with nothing to do, so we decided that we were in the common room of an inn on a stormy night. Instead of picking from my regular stable of characters, I decided to pull out a concept that had been fluttering in the back of my mind since high school. She was a traveling piper named Nakkita, and she had a secret: she was a runaway kidnapped princess. I just didn't know what to do with her.

I couldn't have known that her story wouldn't be complete without Kharduval August, the loyal knight, or Latasha Gildersleeve, the werewolf Moonsinger. I stole them (with permission from Nee-chan and Tree) and the seeds of Peasant Queen were planted.

I wrote the manuscript in a flurry of handwritten and typed pages, sliding under the wire on November 30th to score my first win. Needless to say it was thoroughly addicting even though my next two Nano novels barely made it off the ground.

To this day I consider Peasant Queen and Masquerade to be my best Nanowrimo novels. Peasant Queen was also the only time that I've written an actual ending during Nanowrimo. However, the manuscript had one fatal flaw. It had no middle. Right around the end of week three I skipped over half the guts and glory of the whole ordeal and went straight to the lead-up of the climax.

So this year for my tenth Nanowrimo project I'm dusting off Peasant Queen and rewriting it from stem to stern, guts and all. And I'm posting it all on Smashwords as I go.

It's going to be mayhem. Hopefully the good kind.

My Facebook author page is up and as mentioned before I'll be posting there when manuscript updates are live. I'll also be putting up my working map, portraits of characters, some settings and whatever other goodies I come up with as things go. You can find the page here: https://www.facebook.com/amandalfrede...

I hope you join me!

(Writing for Nanowrimo? Write with me! Add me as a writing buddy here: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/sar...)

So, between Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, I killed two pens, several characters, and a notebook, got halfway through another notebook, enlisted poor Nee-chan to type in what I'd written while I wrote more, consumed an unknown amount of carbonized caffeine, aaaaaannd... failed Nanowrimo spectacularly with 28,952 words at the finish line.

I confess, getting started on this one was tough, primarily because of my decision to put it up as a work in progress on Smashwords (did I mention how terrified I was about putting out something that wasn't finished?), and ultimately it hasn't gotten much interest, which was definitely discouraging. Writing is for me, finishing is for readers, and in the back of my mind there's been this thought that if no one wants to read it, there's no point to finishing it. Another bird to hunt down.

But.

Unlike April's camp project, where it felt like the story was getting thinner and thinner the further it went, Blood Queen was taking on more and more life, and I'm not ready to give that up even though November is over.

According to the Nanowrimo site's calculations, I'll hit the goal around December 25. That's still not half bad. I've decided to keep writing, and keep posting the updates on Smashwords because it's only fair to follow through with what I set out to do.

So. Anyone want a book for Christmas?

(By the way, this is the story I mentioned in my blog post about gratuitous death. This thing's original manuscript reached a death rate of Hamlet proportions. So far, this time around it has a slightly better survival rate. There are only five confirmed deaths, with three more who may or may not be dead. If you've ever wanted to convince an author not to kill your favorite character, here's your chance.)

Well, 2013 kinda sucked. Especially toward the end with my landlord raising the rent while refusing to do maintenance, AND roping us into another month because we didn't turn in our notice during Thanksgiving (when they were closed).

It could have been worse. There was no kitchen fire and no incompetent "recovery" company that stole our stuff (2010), and I did get a lot of writing done, but no goals were actually met. It feels like most everyone around me had an overall lousy year too.

It wasn't entirely a loss though. I started this blog, I published some short stories, started a Facebook author page, and even though all three of the manuscripts I wanted to finish... aren't, all of them made significant progress and I have half drafts of Rose and Blood Queen under my belt. Rose gets to wait her turn until the other Gatewalkers are finished, but Blood Queen is still making slow progress. (Though well meaning, I think my ambitious plan to write three manuscripts at once instead of one at a time was ultimately more than I could chew. Lesson learned. One project at a time. Maybe two? Heh.) Oh, and remember that contest I mentioned waaaaaay back at the end of July? Its deadline was December 31st. I got it written, finished, revised, and submitted with time to spare. By time to spare I mean about three hours, but I wanted to give it one last go-over (and still felt crazy nervous hitting the "submit" button). HA! Take that 2013. One mission accomplished.

I did also manage, between the lovely crazy stress that ended up piled on these last two months, to learn some down and dirty tricks for writing around life, which I fully intend to apply in 2014, especially in packing/moving through January.

Oh, and I got a cat. He's an adorable monster. I seriously missed having a cat. ^_^

For 2014, one goal: read more.

I am in great debates about Camp Nanowrimo this year. Every time I come to the conclusion that I shouldn't participate this year, I can't quite commit to saying "no." On the other hand, even though one of the biggest obstacles has now been taken care of, I can't bring myself to commit to saying "yes" either, because of the remaining factors that still say "no."

On the one hand, I've never missed at least participating in a Nanowrimo event ever since I joined. Even in the chaos of my senior year of college I managed to put a few thousand words on paper for Nanowrimo. But then it was deeply frustrating not to have made headway on that story. It still isn't written. So if I do go for camp this year, I want to really go for it.

I'm not sure I could meet even a modest goal this April.

But then, participating (even with a modest goal) could be what Blood Queen needs to get some momentum back (it's still progressing, but slowly).

Ok. So I want to participate. I just don't know if I could actually finish the race. Sigh.

Last night Nee-chan gave me a much-needed verbal slap upside the head. My method of goal setting just isn’t working. (For examples, start with the beginning of my blog and keep reading.)

When it comes to writing methods, I’m of the “try everything until you find what works and then use it” school of thinking, but I haven’t been applying this to my goal setting. I basically just have a bad habit of doing things like deciding to finish (first draft, revision, and polish) three novels in one year, without actually looking at my average word count per day and deciding if it was attainable. I just decided it was attainable, because you can do anything if you set your mind to it, right?

My right brain is very good at setting lofty goals. My left brain is very good at shutting down under pressure when the deadlines for those goals loom up.

So, instead of just thinking it ain’t broke, it’s time to fix it.

No more deadline goals.*



*Except Nanowrimo, which is an entity of itself, and I’m no longer going to let myself get hung up on the idea of having a nice, neatly packaged first draft at the end of the month.