Reboot!

Nov. 6th, 2015 06:03 pm
jessicasteiner: (Blank Paper)
Greetings. It's been a rough two years, but I'm back.

For the past two years, my work schedule has gone from very busy, to very very insanely busy, and basically stayed there. I've dealt with a coworker who flamed out and dumped their entire caseload on me, and also a three month period of absolutely no income while the government body who writes my paycheque "upgraded" their system. During that entire time, I carried a caseload of over 100 clients and worked every one of them as hard as I could.

It didn't leave much time or brainpower left over for writing, and even less time for blogging about writing.

However, I now see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as my work load at the day job. In addition to that, I've had some important boosts to my writing brain, and I believe I'm firmly back in the saddle now, with enough brainpower left over on the side to attend to my social media as well.

In September, I attended the Out of Excuses Retreat. When I got back from that utterly life-changing experience, I went to the Surrey International Writer's Conference, and pitched OtherWhere to an agent, who asked for a full manuscript.

I've decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year, so that I can concentrate on getting my manuscript up to par and getting it out to the agent.

In the meantime, I am committing to updating this blog regularly again. I intend to update on a rotating schedule, every Friday, and it'll probably be more writing and life updates, and writing exercises, rather than reviews. Though I will probably do the odd review, as well.

So thanks for being patient! I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say.
jessicasteiner: (Blank Paper)
I often have a hard time thinking of things to say here. Often things just seem like same-old-same-old, and I'm just poking along at the things I've been poking along at for months. But at the same time, I'm happy with the progress I'm making. I guess it's time to do an update and round-up.

I'm working on my fifth draft of OtherWhere, doing line edits, tightening the language, obliterating adverbs and unnecessary, redundant wordiness. I'm really happy with it, though I totally don't understand how people can finish this kind of thing in a month or two. After an hour of this stuff, I start skimming and have to stop.

Once I get this part finished, I'll be sending it out to (more) agents and also beta readers. Maybe that'll happen in March. I HOPE it'll happen in March.

I'm also poking around at various other projects without a tonne of focus, just doing whatever I feel like at any given moment. I expect to release my Motivation course by the end of February, though I'm eyeing the date right now and wondering if that's realistic. If not, then it'll be the first or second week of March.

I've been doing a lot more reading as well, which I consider to be really important. I started reading the collected works of Sherlock Holmes, because I've gotten really into Elementary, BBC Sherlock, and the RDJ movies as well, and I had gotten very interested in connecting with the source material, which I had never read. I remember picking it up once when I was probably 12 years old, saw Sherlock shooting up cocaine and went "Hang on, this isn't what I thought it was", but this time I've been really enjoying it.

Thing is, I had to interrupt because I needed to read some short stories. I've written a story I intend to submit to Crossed Genres magazine for their April deadline (Theme: Time travel!), but I haven't read a lot of short stories in recent years. I picked up Dangerous Women, which is an anthology of short stories that cover many genres, by many of the giants in speculative fiction - we're talking Jim Butcher, George R.R. Martin, and Brandon Sanderson. I figure I can learn some things from them. I'm enjoying the stories very much, and learning a lot about structure, and when that's done I'll be finishing off Sherlock Holmes.

Unless I get distracted by the three books I bought today, whoops.
jessicasteiner: (Fangirl Moment)
Yesterday I was travelling and had no internet access, so I was unable to update the blog.

Travelling is fun, and I'm sure a lot of people have travel plans for November, since I have no doubt that a large proportion of Wrimos are American. Personally, that's not the reason I'm not at home - it's my birthday and my wife and I are in Victoria, BC, staying at a bed and breakfast.

But travelling doesn't have to mean no words get done. All it takes is a little planning.

If you don't expect to have any time to write, then plan for that, bank up words by making a special effort to buckle down in the days before your trip, so you create a buffer and don't feel discouraged when you get back. Otherwise, make a specific effort to carve out time during your trip when you can write without neglecting your other responsibilities.

Sure, you might have family time that you can't get out of and that's normal. But there may be times when you're not expected to be doing anything else. I had a ferry ride to get to where I am, and I made a point of writing while on the ferry. Right now I'm sitting at the B&B. Miko is off doing a photoshoot, which is part of the reason we came here, and I'm using that time to get my words in. Tomorrow will be ferry time again. In the end, I expect to have at least as many words done during this trip as I would have done if I were at home, yet I'm still having a great time and getting to enjoy my vacation.

Don't get discouraged by a disruption to your routine. You can still find time, even if it's just half an hour, to get something done. I promise if you do that, the feeling of accomplishment you will feel, knowing you did the right thing and worked towards your goals instead of throwing it out the window, will make the sacrifice worthwhile.
jessicasteiner: (Solitaire)
Yeah, so I've committed myself to a bunch of things and I feel I should probably... get them straight in my head so I don't miss a deadline.

And who knows, it may be interesting to someone besides me. So this is what I'm working on, in some kind of hierarchical order whose logic is obscure even to me:

  • Final line edit and polish of The Sleeping Death - 189/402 pages complete

  • First draft of The Dreaming - 18/27 chapters written. I've actually got to go back and total up the words on this because I have no idea how many words I've got total.

  • World building and plotting for a series I am referring to as Harry Potter in Space with Aliens (working title for book 1: Dale Shepard and the Bug Aliens from Outer Space)

  • Signed up for a 10,000 word original story for [community profile] originalbigbang - Rough draft and summary due September 15th

  • Signed up for a 1000 word reversebang for [community profile] originalbigbang - Claiming April 24th, story due May 22nd

  • Research on Sengoku-period Japan for a possible alternate history steampunk series set in that time period.


In addition to those substantive projects, some things to keep in mind:

  • Going to try to write some ebook reviews and crosspost them to [community profile] sps

  • Signed up for [community profile] thedailywriter, with a goal of 10,000 words for the month of April. It's April 6th and I'm already blowing that goal away - 6191/10,000

  • also signed up for [community profile] words_count with a goal of 500 words per day and 1 hour per day of writing-related activity, including editing. I've been doing well with that and have checked in each day with my activity.


So that's what I'm up to. How about you?

Profile

jessicasteiner: (Default)
Jessica Steiner

February 2016

S M T W T F S
 1234 56
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
2829     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 1st, 2025 12:24 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios