October books: Still 5/6 (I have 3 pages left in the sixth, so tomorrow, I guess, or later today if I have time)
I feel sooooo much better having thrown all my baggage for the year out the window. Now the sky is the limit, and I can do whatever I want without worrying about deadlines or quality or what have you.
And the timing works great as well. Saturday November starts, and though Nano is dead there are plenty of other groups willing to step into the void, and writing is always a good way to take a break from holiday related stresses.
The other thing about doing a Nano-esque “challenge” is that it will force me to focus on a single project and not do the insane thing I occasionally try where I’m attempting two or three or sometimes even four projects at a time.
(The issue is, of course, sometimes I can work on several projects at a time and everything is great. And so then I think I can do it all the time, and never take non-writing projects into account when planning things out.)
Like any time where I am free to do what I will, there are a number of options, which I have narrowed down from even more options. But the breakdown essentially is in a couple of categories:
Novel/novella vs. Short Stories
I can pick a novel/novella project and focus exclusively on that, OR I could do a short story project. The novels vary in genre and ideas, but the short stories are either: 1) horror shorts, or 2) related shorts set in the world as the high fantasy trilogy I’m currently querying. If I do the related shorts, I have a SkillShare class idea to go along with it.
A novel would better help me focus, but a short story project might scratch the itch of doing many ideas at once, which does tend to build up when nothing has been done in a while.
Something Fun vs. Something Hard
I know I talked on Monday about working on something silly to get my groove back, but if I’m going to be writing just to write and without the pressure of doing something well, maybe now is the time to work on a project that is complicated or will require me to try out new skills. In Nanos past I have often integrated something new into the project–writing from a non-protagonist point of view, or trying a new genre, or a new story structure–so this could continue that tradition. Since the point of Nano was always Quantity over Quality, this could be the perfect time.
A few years back I did a summer series about stories I would like to write some day, and two of my entries were about dual timelines and interlocking lives. Maybe now is the time.
Alternately, I have a couple of novel ideas that have been floating around for a looooong time, and maybe we should do one of them. Both of them will be related but new genres (steampunk, straight science fiction without the horror I normally do) so they could still work.
So, over the next few days, I’ll need to narrow things down. Novel or short stories, complicated vs fun. I’ll let you know what I chose next week, when we will hopefully be a few days into the writing and things will be going well.
See you next week, squiders!
