How the hell is the year half over?

I don’t know about your year, but mine’s been flying by. Back in January, I made some goals for my year.

• Finish Too Far Gone.
• Attend at least one SF&F convention in a city that I’ve never been to.
• Revise at least one of the three four (after NaNoWriMo) drafted novel manuscripts I’ve been letting lie fallow until it is in submission shape and then send it out.
• Be more diligent about keeping my short fiction on submission.
• Get those old stories polished and out the door (which I think will also help the goal above from getting lost in the shuffle)
• Write and submit at least two new short stories.
• Write a script for a secret comic project with Samantha Beiko.
• Say no to more “author” stuff and yes to more “writing” stuff.
• Keep better track of my daily word count output.

Only one of the items is “done”. but I’m not too worried. Too Far Gone has been turned in to my publisher and is in editorial, so I’m confident that I’ll be crossing that line off, but hey, as Ted Callan says, “Shit happens” right? I’ll cross it off when I have the book in my hand, because that’s when my job is finished, and the readers’ begins. I have my membership and my hotel booked for World Fantasy in Saratoga Springs, NY. I’m in the home stretch of finally getting NaNo novel 2011 revised and in shape to submit. I’ve written and submitted one new short story (and it sold, to Tesseracts Nineteen: Superhero Universe!), and have polished a couple of older stories to add them to my short story submission rotation, which, while not clockwork, is at least operational again. I’m still tracking my daily word output, and have managed to say no to a couple of things in order to protect writing time. We’ll see how those two goals hold up for the remainder of the year.

How’d June go?

• Work in Progress, keep at it. Lock down four more chapters, which will take me to the last 50 pages of the previous draft, and make a plan for the revisions of those pages.

June didn’t really go at all. At least, not according to my posted goals. I didn’t lock down those four chapters. I made it through an edit pass or two on each chapter, but I’m not ready to call them done yet. This is largely because edits for Too Far Gone dropped on my plate, so that ate up a lot of my critical brain. I did write a comic script to pitch to an artist though, so while it wasn’t on my list, the month wasn’t a total wash creatively.

And on deck for July?

There’s almost certainly another round of edits inbound for Too Far Gone. So I don’t want to make too huge of a project list, so I’m going to recycle June’s goal. There’s a few things I want accomplished by When Words Collide in August, but sekkrit projects are sekkrit for the moment.

• Work in Progress, keep at it. Lock down four more chapters, which will take me to the last 50 pages of the previous draft, and make a plan for the revisions of those pages.
• Finish revising and submit one of my fallow short stories.
• Get all of my unsold short stories back out on submission.

Write on!