After a long burn out writing session pushing myself to 50K words in one month, my writing has sloughed off slightly in my need for a little “break” from the intensity of pushing myself that hard.
Where I am finding myself right now is in a slight lull, where I am still adding a little bit to the novel I started last month, but not in nearly as frantic a pace as before. I’ve slowed down a bit to come up for air, but in the process I’ve managed to get a clear head about where I want to go from here–which is good.
I’ve set the new goal of finishing this current novel by May 15th, and, since I have a lot more story to tell than I originally thought, I’ve bumped the new word count goal up to 75K words. Right now I’ve managed to eek myself up to about 55K words. So, essentially, I have a week to write 20K words to finish this thing, which is pretty intense. Almost 3000 words per day from this point forward to meet that goal.
I don’t think it’s going to be as intense as I think. I don’t HAVE to reach 75K words to consider this novel complete. The 75K words is just a guide to get me a given word count goal to reach for. The main thing I am striving for right now is just finishing this thing. Get the story complete in it’s first draft. If it hit’s 75K words or more, fine, but the ultimate goal is to get this story finished so that I can move on to bigger and better things.
So that’s my first goal: Finished first draft by May 15th.
When I have a finished first draft, I am going to take a break from novel writing (even though the intensity of writing has really spawned like a billion new ideas that I keep feeling myself being tugged in all directions to start on but am forcing myself to put off for now until I can finish this). I intend to shelf this first draft for approximately a month. Then I will begin my first round of revisions (which is where the fun begins, eh? lol) on or after June 15th.
For two weeks, though, I intend to just relax from my writing a bit (which means I’ll probably blog more about something besides writing) and take it easy. I have 3 books I’m trying to read currently all at once and I’m going to take the time to finish all of them up and read the other couple of books I want to read but don’t have time for right now.
Then, on June 1st, after taking a couple of weeks off, I intend to fall back on my original idea of freelance writing. I want to start getting some shorter submissions out and see what kinds of things I can get into on a smaller scale than novel-writing. Maybe get myself into print somewhere and pick up a few extra bucks doing so.
The ultimate goal, then, will be to find the balance between writing and editting a novel and submitting smaller pieces to magazines, e-zines, etc. and not overworking myself in the process. Although, I really don’t feel like writing is “work”. I’m having a blast putting out these word count goals. I love every second of the writing process and I have truly found something that I really passionate about and makes me happy. Something that is all mine and mine alone, and that is truly exciting.
I’m also discovering that I don’t CARE really if my work never sees professional print (although the money would be nice and I’ve dreamt my whole life about writing a book and getting it published) so much as I care about the process…the journey. I feel like that’s a good place to be, because I realize that mass rejection is quickly approaching and facing that rejection and revision and criticism is going to be tough. But I’ve faced tougher things and came out a better person, so I hope this will be a similar experience.
All in all, I just wanted to make a post getting the ideas about where I want to go out in front of me so that I can read them. I’ve veered quite a bit from my original goals that I posted when I started this blog, but that’s a good thing. This thing seems like it’s taken on a life of its own lately and that’s truly an awesome feeling being a part of something like that.
In other news, I’m going back for another dose of the writer’s crit group tonight. I’ve gotten to read some of the stuff by another person in the group and it’s pretty good. I had a lot of fun reading it and making comments on it. I’ll be curious to see how things go tonight, because last week was pretty informal.
I’m having a blast doing what I’ve always wanted to do and just learning to love and accept myself and gain the confidence to believe that I can do this as a full time profession someday if I keep working at it. Time will tell.
