Farewell to May

We’re already halfway through the year. Yikes! I think that means it’s time for a reevaluation of the year’s goals (which is something like three months overdue), and I’m going to snag the Spring Cleaning Writer Challenge Tag (now that it should be summer) from Melissa at Quill Pen Writer. (And after that will commence the normal updates I include in these things.)

Here are the rules:
1) Link back to the person who tagged you.
2) Share the picture.
3) Answer the questions or even pick and choose which ones you answer.
4) Tag 3 other writers and inform them that you tagged them (via comment/message/email or hey, even carrier-pigeon or smoke signal; I’m not picky).

Dust-Bunnies and Plot-Bunnies: Reorganize your writing goals (or make new ones)

First, my original goals for this year:

Prepare The Dark War Trilogy for publishing. BAHAHAHAHA. This is absolutely not going to happen. I’m nearly 80k into The Last Assassin, about 65k into The Shadow Raven, and The King’s Paladin is basically not even started. I doubt I’ll even have the first drafts done by the end of the year, much less have them edited and pretty much ready to go. I’m way more ambitious than I realize, apparently.

Publish House of Mages. Well I already announced I was scrapping this one back in January or February, so that doesn’t need anything else.

Publish The Heart of the Baenor. First of all, another example of my over-ambition: I intended to publish two books this year. Professional authors do that. Professional authors with editors and cover designers that they go back to. I’m still just a little fledgling without an editor or a cover designer (although I’m in the process of remedying that). While I’d like to still shoot for this goal, I don’t think I’m likely to reach it.

Get started on The Historian. I’m not sure I even want to write this story at all at this point, and this timeline was one in which I had the first drafts of all the Dark War books finished prior to NaNoWriMo, so this one’s on the very, very back burner.

Win all three NaNoWriMo events. One down, two to go.

Write 2k every day. I wish I could say I’d stuck to this one.

Do some Kersir worldbuilding every day. I’d honestly forgotten this was even a goal of mine. I have done some worldbuilding over the past six months, both with Kersir and the Aleruus planets, but certainly not every day.

Start making an income. This isn’t specifically a writing goal, but my intention with this one was always to achieve it through writing means. I’m working on getting a freelance business up and running, so this is still a goal for the year.

New/continuing goals:

Finish The Last Assassin, The Shadow Raven, or both. First drafts, that is. I’m off to a good start with The Shadow Raven with the Go Teen Writers 100-for-100 challenge, but I don’t actually know how long these books are going to be so I don’t know how much I’ll still end up having to write after the challenge ends on August 31st. We’ll see how that goes.

Start making an income. Like I said, I’m working my way toward a freelance editing business, and I’d also like to start selling cheap short stories as ebooks.

Publish The Heart of the Baenor. At the very least with this one I want a second draft completed, ideally a third, and I want the cover and editor locked in. (Which is dependent on starting to make money, because I’m a broke teenager.)

Win all three NaNoWriMo events. I still intend to make this goal. I have yet to win all three in a year. (And I want to start up a new winning streak of the November event since I broke it last year. It was due to vacation, and I wouldn’t have given up vacation, but I was only 10k away.)

Which stage are you at? Expound!

a. Remodeling layouts (planning the story)
b. Painting the walls in colorful hues (writing)
c. Polishing the windows and scrubbing the floors and putting flowers in vases (editing)
d. Blueprints (not to the cleaning or remodeling yet… just drawing up plans for the very beginning inklings of a story)
e. Some combination of those things (cleaning out a closet)

Cleaning out a closet. I’m “painting the walls in colorful hues” with The Shadow Raven and “polishing the windows, etc.” with The Heart of the Baenor.

Treasure from the back of the closet (Share one to three snippets you love!)

From The Shadow Raven:

Lucienne gave {Detren} a look, but Nissa read a twinkle in her eye that said she wasn’t quite as displeased as she let on. Nissa looked the woman over and noted from her crisp black uniform that she held to her military position even when she wasn’t on duty. Which was probably never, Nissa realized. There hadn’t been a war for hundreds of years. After the Ocean War nearly decimated both Roenor and Mandoria, they’d worked hard at not going too far into their disagreements again. She’d paid at least a bit of attention to her history lessons, she realized. Or maybe she’d taken them in through osmosis. She’d certainly fallen asleep on her books enough for that.

 

From The Heart of the Baenor:

Bloggers I tag:

Leila at Wildflowers and Cosmic Tea

Mels at Melody Jackson, Author

Anna at Conscious Dreamers

 

*a loudspeaker crackles to life* We now return to your regular programming. *loudspeaker snaps off*

May’s Writing

I’ve written 24,201 words this month, which isn’t wonderful (there were far too many days when I wrote nothing. XP), but I’m getting back on track with the 100-for-100 Challenge, I finally got back into The Shadow Raven after a three-and-a-half month hiatus, I contacted an artist about doing the cover art for The Dark War Trilogy (including The Heart of the Baenor), I finished the first section of a giant writing resource I’m making (though I’ll likely add to it later on), and I redesigned my newsletter and I made a new newsletter to begin a street team, so I’ve actually gotten more done this month than I’d realized. Most of that happened in the latter half of the month, but it still got done.

May’s Reading

I finally finished things this month! I started The Darkling Child by Terry Brooks back in July and finally finished it this month, and I started The Hobbit back in December 2016 and finally finished it this month. *winces* I also read Rebekah DeVall’s new short story Iron Core and wrote a review. I also read Hope Ann’s The Stealthmaster’s Shadow, which releases today, and wrote a review yesterday. Lastly, I’ve been reading Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett Harris, which is wonderful so far.

Other Stuff

The only other remarkable thing to happen this month was that I applied for a mission trip to Maine and didn’t get to go. I’m still kind of wrestling with God to figure that out, but I’m trying to trust Him.

I’m looking forward to this summer, though, and specifically to camp. Camp was wonderful last year and I can’t wait to go back. ^-^ Plus my best friend and I will be performing The Other Side from The Greatest Showman at the talent show which is going to be SUPER fun. :D


How was your May? Are you looking forward to summer? Have your writing goals changed since the beginning of the year? I’d love to hear your revised goals in the comments. :)

2 thoughts on “Farewell to May

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *