Writing Wednesdays: 5 writing resolutions I'm making this month
Last year held a lot of ups and downs for me, and I shared a few highlights from the year in this post - several of which were about writing or to do with my writing and books.
I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions, but in the spirit of that, I decided to set myself a few writing goals to focus on this month.
1. Final Edits on #Book5
Last year, my agent sent me back some edits on a novel that took me a long while to write (mostly because things like uni and my old job straight after uni got in the way - but also I think because I took it so seriously, I stressed myself out about it, which made it harder to get stuck in and actually make any progress). But last summer, I managed to crack through all of the edits and send it back off.
I've got a last round of light edits to make which realistically should take me a couple of hours. I plan to get through them one evening after work this week and send them back so I can call it done and dusted and all ready to go!
2. Finish the first draft of my new book...
On December 8th, I started writing a new book. Let's call it WIP2 for now. It's a little different, because it's more New Adult than Young Adult (as in, my main characters are 23ish, rather than 17ish). That's actually been really fun - both because it's something so different to what I usually write, and that's been fun to explore, but also because I've really, really loved the story. So much so, in fact, I even mentioned it to my agent on the phone just after I started writing it. I did almost 9,000 words in one afternoon/evening last week.
And the best part is: it's almost done! I'm at around 42,000 words as I write this post, and in all honesty, I don't want it to be a long book. I want it to be the kind of story you can read in a few hours. (And I may have looked at a few Kindle books I've read of the length I want, and compared one of my own published books on Kindle to work out roughly how many words I'd like it to be.)
I know it won't be finished in a couple more chapters and there'll be more work to do on it, but it'll be great to have finished a first draft and then polish it up, and see what my agent thinks of it as a first pass. See if it's got any legs.
Again - this is something that, with the right mood, should take me just a couple of hours in an evening, and I'd love to get that finished this week too.
3. ...and actually come up with a name for this new book!
I've been following my own advice from this recent Writing Wednesdays post about how to come up with a title for your novel, and brainstorming on my Trello board for the book to try and get a title. So far: zilch. I'm hoping inspiration will strike this week. Fingers crossed for me, eh?
4. Get back to working on the WIP I started last summer
Once edits on #Book5 were all wrapped up last summer, I sent them back to my agent, and immediately started on my next book. (Which, yes, I may have abandoned a bit, despite my better judgement, to work on the other new book, WIP2. Let's call this one WIP1.)
Anyhow: WIP1 is at around 20,000 words, I think, and I'd really like to get stuck back into that. I've fallen into the same trap as with #Book5 where I'm so focused on making it as good as I can that I'm psyching myself out too much to actually work on it properly. I'm determined to shake that off this month and properly get back to it and make some real progress!
5. Read more!
I'm ashamed to say that last year, I read very few books. I must've read about ten between November and the end of the year - all of which were adorable romance-y books I found in the Kindle store or The Works for dirt cheap. And I was travelling an awful lot for work, which meant a lot of time to read.
And I miss reading. I just seem to end up doing something else in the evenings instead. (Like, recently, binge watching Lucifer on Amazon Prime.) I've got so many books that I want to read and my to-be-read pile is always growing... I'm just not making a dent in it! Maybe that was part of the problem with WIP1 and #Book5, where I struggled to get into them.
So I'm setting myself an easy target here: I want to read one YA book this month. Just one. The trickier part, I think, will be deciding which one from my TBR pile to read first!
Have you got any writing resolutions for the New Year, or even any shorter-term goals? What do you hope for this year in your writing career? Let me know in the comments!
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