Course Correcting
The week has drawn to a close. My weekend somehow decided it wanted to cram approximately 12 million things into 2 days, and my sleep schedule isn’t even a suggestion anymore (I fear a sleep debt crash is imminent), but forward progress has been made. Have I fully gotten back onto the track I wanted to be on? No. But things are looking better.
Last week, I got 5 pages written all week. For reference, 5 pages is my daily goal… At the start of this week, I decided to pause work on Ebon Maw until I find out what’s going on with the magazine, and instead of languishing in creative block land on 1 project whose deadline I missed, divide and distribute my attention (and those 5 pages!) across 3 projects. The hope was if I got stuck on 1 thing, I had 2 other things to keep myself moving forward.
It has succeeded!
The project I’d locked up on is a middle-grade spooky fun story that I wanted to have ready for Halloween time this year. I essentially challenged myself to bang it out in 3 months, telling myself that R. L. Stine used to knock out a Goosebumps every month. Stine I am not… I did, however, realize what my issue was (I was just cycling through story beats again-and-again: Home > School > Lunch > Repeat). So I went back to page 1 of the manuscript and gave myself permission to have fun and not worry about anything aside from telling the story. I started that on Tuesday. Today is Friday. I’ll be working on (manuscript) page 7 today.
In addition to the MG spooky fun story, I’m also working on a pair of more serious young adult novels. The first, I want to have ready and out for February. It’s a dark YA urban fantasy that desperately wanted to be a paranormal romance, but got lost somewhere along the way. This is the first novel I wrote under my own name instead of ghostwriting for someone else, and the original draft was completed all the way back in 2012. As I said weeks ago, I am pulling my old backlog of manuscripts out, tinkering with them, and will be turning them loose on the world. How fitting that the one that started it all is the one where I decided to say damn the rules and write the story.
The other project, or maybe I should say projects since there is one that will be un-pausing as soon as the spooky fun novel finishes, are both planned for June releases. The first is a sequel to Tir na nOg, The Origami Earth: [Book II - Subtitle TBA]. You didn’t think we weren’t going to see an elven wedding, did you?
Meanwhile, the other June project (which is the third project I am actively working on now) is going to be a total divergence from everything else I write: a young adult contemporary drama. No magic. No fantasy. No whimsy. Just a girl trying to survive against the weight of a devouring mother.
This girl… This girl! Ever since I thought her up, she’s been demanding ALL my creative energy. I swear, I could write a story bible for her and her world at this point! It’s completely insane! Honestly? I’m lucky she lets me get any sleep at this point!
I have my daily goal ahead of me (1 in the MG, 2 in the YA con., and 2-3 in YA UF), but things are moving along. Just need to log those pages/words, and survive the weekend.
See you again on Monday!
