Initially when I started thinking of the goals I wanted to set for the year, I wanted to aim to completely edit and publish a novel this year. Part of the reasoning is that I’ve looked over my project list and had to face the fact that while I have a lot of writing projects.
Forty-one, to be exact.
Of those forty-one, three are or were previously published. That leaves me with thirty-eight stories in various stages of the writing process, and the majority of those are sitting in either rough or early draft status. Part of that is because of my own bad habit of restarting and rewriting. It’s not the first time I’ve tried this goal.
When talking about projects that are tens of thousands of words however, sheer size becomes overwhelming. I draft short and my word count typically grows over the course of edits.
Knowing some of my pain points, tackling something that’s already eighty-thousand words and only going to grow brings a lot of doubt to whether I could complete my one-year goal. The best option was to find something shorter and focus on that.
Aside from my short stories, I don’t have anything particularly short. I thought about doing something like I’d done with Seventh, breaking a slightly longer story into serial installments.
The important thing to remember about Seventh is that although I posted it as a serial, it is ultimately a novella. Short, easy to read in one sitting. Easy to edit too, since the final word count was just over eighteen thousand words.
While I have short stories, most of these are character and worldbuilding exercises that only focus on a scene, maybe two. Some of them are connected to larger stories, and a few are written just for fun.
Looking at my project list, there wasn’t anything that initially jumped out at me that might work for a serial story. As I’ve mentioned though, I tend to draft short. Most of my completed works are anywhere from a third larger, to fully doubled from their early draft size.
And I absolutely have projects that are already at monstrous sizes even in the early stages. In particular, one is sitting at an unwieldy hundred and forty thousand words and was cut there only to spawn a partially finished sequel currently hovering at around eighty-thousand words. Yes, it’s an epic fantasy.
Obviously that particular project will end up being a series regardless of what else I do. Looking at the story and the notes however, it occurred to me that if it was already that large, I might be able to break down every two or three chapters into their own stories.
Reasonably, it’s doable. Not the most conventional, but convention isn’t necessarily the only way to do things.
Given that we’re now talking segments that are between twelve and fifteen thousand words a piece, I’ve set my goal to have at least the first of these novellas ready for publication by the end of August. I’m still a little on the fence about how I want to do that exactly, but I’m trying to focus on one step at a time.
First things first, I have a lot of editing ahead of me.
The Written Vixen 