Some Medium-Term Plans
I’m a little behind schedule for December. I’m still going to try to work on sfmagic.org for this month, moving it over to Python and Pylons, and possibly to PostGreSQL, and moving it to a different server.
This month, then, will be much more tech-oriented, as I hope to write about the various problems I encounter trying to rewrite the code for the site. I hope it’ll be a fun learning experience, but we’ll see.
I also hope spend time planning my next novel. I intend to plan this one much more closely, and to have that plan finished by January so that I can start work on it in January, and finish work on it by early March. I’d been planning to do 1000 words per day, and so to have a 60,000 word novel after about two months. Taking what I can from my last experience, the plan for this novel will include every chapter (between 12 and 15 of them), broken down into sections of 1000 words, with a detailed sketch of what that section should contain. That way the experience each day should be much smoother, just sit down, look at the sketch, write.
I also intend the first draft of this one to be “readable”, in that I intend it to be sufficiently good that I’d be prepared to let other people see it. This is in direct contrast to my approach to the first novel, where I turned all quality controls off in order to be able to write at all. I think writing the first one, and the frequent writing-for-the-public I do on this site, have helped me beyond that requirement.
This novel should also be more amenable to a higher-quality first draft, and to more detailed planning, because it will be a lot more straightforward in terms of structure and flow. One primary protagonist (instead of four or more), a fairly linear plot (instead of one that connects events separated by a lot of space and time), less complicated characters (not tortured really-late-capitalist neurotics).
After that, I plan to adapt a story of mine into a script, a script I don’t intend to take too seriously and which I think could be a lot of fun.
Blogging shall continue (until morale improves…), most likely on the same Su-Mo-Tu-Th-Fr schedule. I think that editing had a bad effect on the quality of my posts, and hope to make them better. By next March I’d like to have written at least a couple of posts that aren’t written in a single day, that I spend a little more time on.
Tentatively, I hope to get all that done by the end of March, but a variety of factors could change that plan. I’ll have to see how I feel in January, for one thing—this second draft took a lot out of me, more than I expected, and I might not be ready to get going on it that soon. (Then again, right now I feel nothing but enthusiasm for starting a different project!)