I haven’t blogged much about my writing lately, but it’s not because I haven’t been working on it. If anything, I’ve been afraid that by blogging about what I’m doing, I’ll jinx what’s been an otherwise productive few months. It seems like everytime I blog about a current project, I lose momentum on it… although that could also just be my paranoid writer self.
Anyway, I do have a few updates that I wanted to share:
1) I finished the rough draft of a new novel.
I’ve already posted this on Twitter and Facebook, so if you’ve already seen it there, I apologize for the repeat. But here I can actually go into a bit more detail. I started writing the rough draft of a new novel at the Rainforest Writers Retreat this year, and on June 15, I finished it. The draft is 70,180 words long, and was written in about three and a half months… which I’m pretty pleased with, considering I went through spells of multiple weeks where I didn’t work on it.
Of the three novel-length pieces I’ve finished, this is the one I’m happiest with, without a doubt. I’ll be workshopping Chapter 1 at the Cascade Writers Conference in July, and I’m looking forward to that. But in the meantime, I need to revise the rest of the novel, which brings me to the next item on the list.
2) I’ll be participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon.
The Clarion West season is upon us, which means lots of author readings, writer socials, and of course the Write-a-thon, Clarion West’s big fundraiser and a good motivation to get some writing done. My goal will be to edit one full chapter a day, and a minimum of five per week. This is the summer, after all… have to save some room for hiking! (On that note, if you want to see photos from my hikes and various summer trips, check out my photoblog.)
But for the Write-a-thon, I’ll be trying to edit five chapters a week. The novel has 23 chapters, so it should take me just under five weeks to get through the whole thing. Any extra time, I’ll use for revision and cleanup of the overall work. People who’ve done a lot of editing might think I’m doing this backward, that I should do large-scale, overall edits and then go chapter-by-chapter… but I actually think the chapter-by-chapter process is going to work better for me personally. We’ll see how it goes. Despite the fact that this is my third novel-length piece that I’ve written, this is the first novel-length piece that I’ve edited, so I’ll be aiming to find the best process for me, and hopefully learning a lot in the process.
So with that said, please sponsor me! Clarion West is an awesome workshop for aspiring writers, and a great benefit to the writing community. But it’s expensive to run, and tuition isn’t cheap. It’d be nice to keep student costs down and increase the scholarship opportunities, and in that regard, every dollar helps. Think of it as a down payment toward the next generation of awesome science fiction & fantasy books.
3) I have a new short story coming out later in 2014.
Because of all the novel work I’ve been doing this year, my short stories have suffered. Nevertheless, I have written a couple– one of which I’m currently waiting to hear back from on its latest submission– but by and large I’m not writing or submitting short stories this year.
That said, it’s not entirely quiet on that front. I do have a short story, The Gatebuilders’ Daughter, which is due to appear in the magazine Stupefying Stories later this year. It may be a few months yet, but I’ll let you know when that appears.
So that’s about it for now, but I’ll let you know as more news comes. Between writing, photography, and hiking, it’s going to be a busy summer. I’m looking forward to it.
And on that note, Happy Solstice, everybody!
