Happy 2013 – A Year for Writing

It’s day one. Yes, it’s an arbitrary distinction, but it’s one I am wholeheartedly embracing.

After taking a look at my writing goals for this year, here’s what I’m doing. I’m erasing the Google Docs tracker that you see in the sidebar, and re-assessing my goals. As for a bare word count goal for the year, I’m setting that at 750,000 (which including my NaNo books I’ve done in years past, will put me at 1,000,000 words). And if I allow for Sundays off and a two week vacation, that means that starting today, I should be writing 2,500 words per work day. (There’s a very slight buffer there, but 2500 becomes the new baseline. Which after reading Michael Moorcock’s “Death is No Obstacle” is pretty small potatoes. Moorcock’s normal writing day is 15,000 words. (I’m hoping by the end of the year to be able to put up 5k on a regular basis.)

But there’s more than just numbers involved in this year’s writing. This year, I aim to write things that support, defend, and promote my values. And yeah, I know everyone does that. I aim to do it on purpose and with malice aforethought. 

And that starts with a sense of religion and values. It’s already in everything I write, going all the way back to Frosty’s Deposit, which features a father wanting to get to his son on time for a camping trip. Cost of Miracles and Cost of Duty feature moral choices, loyalty, etc. The Sinner stories are explicitly about religious issues, with a wandering gunman trying to buy his soul back from the Devil. There’s discussion of faith and its role, good vs. evil, and in Perdition’s Posse, there’s very explicit language about how some evil cannot be reasoned with, cannot be bargained with, cannot be countenanced, and when the cup of wrath is full, well, then it may just be fire and brimstone time. Which is not a completely inaccurate description of gunpowder.

And you get into the NaNoWriMo novels I’ve written, and all bets are off. They are all about family, religion, morality. Battlehymn has explicitly religious characters, though no one can say they’re all in your face about it.

Anyway, it’s safe to say I’ve been thinking and writing about these issues for a long time without realizing it until a few weeks ago, when I started looking at the themes of my stories and started seeing all the places where I was talking about issues of faith and morality.

So, my aim is to do two things, I suppose – first, I aim to explore issues of faith and morality and traditional Judeo-Christian values in my writing with malice aforethought. And second, I hope to write well enough that you read it anyway. I won’t always succeed. But that’s the writing goal I’m setting for myself.

Boo-yah