Writing Update

There's a reason I don't do NaNoWriMo each year. Well, there's a few of them. One is because I'm the lamest piece of crap there is. But aside from that, November is not a good month for me. Work always ramps up big time in November each year, and, conversely, my free time goes away. This year is worse than most though, because one of my colleagues became a father the other day. He is taking time off to be with his new baby, and we are now short-staffed on top of having more to do than usual.

All of that makes me wonder why I chose November to be the start of my big "I'm going to write 500 words a day for the whole year" thing. I guess I had to start sometime, but it seems like shooting myself in the foot to pick one of the busiest months of the year as my start month. I should have given myself a chance to build up some steam and get some good habits before facing a challenge like this month.

I haven't done very well so far this month. I've written 2,500 words of the 5,500 that I should have written so far. I've got a lot to make up for. On the plus side, I finally put a "THE END" on the story that I spent half of September writing called, "Sepia Tone Prison." It's really long, a little north of 11,000, but it's done. By the way, the offer is open to anyone who would like to read it (and offer constructive criticism if you'd like, though that's not necessary). Just drop an email to editor at dunesteef dot com, and I'll send the story out to you. I was going to post it on the blog, but some people said that it would be a bad idea, making it unsalable later on. Of course, they haven't read the story, to know how unsalable it already is, but whatever...

So, I've got a lot of work to do to catch up. I think I have several double days to put in. Hopefully, I can start with those tomorrow.

Rish and I have been talking about collaborating on a space opera story about an independent space trader ship and its crew. We're still hashing out the details on how it will go, but we're both fairly excited about it. We want to make it a very rich universe, leaving room for many adventures and multiple stories. I suppose I can write a bunch of my words as the background and character bios for this tale. (Or maybe these tales!) Lots of world building to be done.

Then, I suppose I ought to get a story started that I could write on the days that it's Rish's turn to be writing on the space opera. I started a story earlier this year, that I think I might dive into again. It's a juvenile story (I think that's the category, right? The one that comes before YA) about a young man whose computer spontaneously develops artificial intelligence. I've started this story several times now. Once it was an older guy as the main character, but that didn't seem to work. So, I changed it to the younger kid, wrote for a while, and realized that I hadn't planned quite well enough. I bailed on it again, but knew I'd return. I think it might be time for that.

The main thing I needed to do was deeper, more in depth character bios. After flubbing that second attempt, I went and studied how to develop good characters, and I made up a document with dozens of questions that should be answered about a character before starting a story. That will surely give me enough work to write a bunch of words too.

So, it's going to be the adventures of the crew of the Cheshire Cat, and the third attempt at writing Prime. Let's see if I can get caught back up to the spot I should be in: 5,500 words. Sadly, that number keeps rising each day, unless of course, I make it smaller with the work I do each day.