Après NaNo

This is the current state of my office. Some of the clutter is Christmas presents, but most of it is detritus from the kitchen/dining room because of the renovation and there’s just no place else for it. But perhaps you can see how uninspiring it is to work in there right now.

As usually happens when NaNo is done, my writing mojo has taken a nose dive. I finished NaNo with a thousand words to spare and since then I have marked up a story, twice, and wrote my weekly blog posts.

What have I been doing instead? Playing a lot of solitaire on the computer, sometimes a game or two of Text Twist, or hidden objects thrown in for variety. In other words, I was pretty much a couch potato last week.

Which is fine once in awhile, but for the long term it’s pretty unproductive. Of course it didn’t help that the weather was pretty grey and dismal, which is depressing at the best of times. So this week the focus will be getting back on track. I even have a nice long list of things to do when the writing isn’t going well.

If you can see my progress bars on the right hand side of the page, you’ll notice that I have a new goal for Firestorm. I figure it’s going to be at least 100,000 words before it’s done, and it’s going to require a fair bit of planning.

I think I mentioned at the beginning of November that Firestorm is the prequel to a couple of swords and sorcery stories I attempted many moons ago. Well, the problem was, I didn’t have a clear idea of the path the book should take. I knew my character, and I had a nice little synopsis of his life, but I was real sketchy on the details.

Then we come to the two stories. They’re actually very similar to each other and I was hoping to incorporate events from one, or the other, or both into Firestorm, but the Brand in Firestorm is very different from the Brand in the two stories. Which has led me a whole lot of floundering as I try to get him to where he needs to be to continue the novel.

Meanwhile, I bought myself a coil binder so I can do my own binding for my book flood anthologies from now on. Even if I only use it once a year, in five years it’ll have paid for itself. Now all I have to do is get the stories organized.

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Wordage Report

Yeah. No real words to report for last week. Shame on me. But I really don’t want to lose my momentum on Firestorm, so I’m going to set myself a daily goal.

Goals From Last Week

1. Finish NaNo – I definitely did, and I have the certificate to prove it.
2. Organize book flood stories – that would be a big fail.
3. Blog posts – done, and on time.
4. Editing story for submission – edited it twice but I’m still not happy with it.

Goals For This Week

1. 500 words a day on Firestorm.
2. Finish editing story and submit.
3. Finalize stories for book flood anthology.
4. Learn to use coil binder.