Harsh Truths and Game Plans

I go through spurts of reading Cracked where I spend hours and weeks reading it, then ignore it for months. Someone (I lost who, unfortunately) on G+ linked to an article, and I wandered over to read it.

You should too.  Go ahead, I'll wait.

I think he's very much right that there are two reactions to the advice that you are only the sum of your accomplishments: bitter and motivated.  For me, it's motivated.

I've never really lacked for things to do.  I opened an Etsy shop for my paper flowers, with a couple of paintings thrown in.  Then I added duct tape.  Then cross-stitch.  Give it a couple of months, who knows what I'll try my hand at?  Jack of all trades, master of none, that's me.

But, along those lines, the successful Etsy shops aren't the ones that sell six different types of thing.  They sell one, and they do it really, really well.  Focus is the key.  Pick a trade and master it.  Once you've mastered, then you can start messing with other stuff.

Now, mainly my Etsy shop has been a way to get something out of the stuff I do to keep my hands busy while I'm doing other things, so randomness in a side project is forgivable.  (Or so I tell myself.)

But at 26 years old, it's really time for me to settle down and focus.  I need to stop spending so much time consuming and start creating.  I need to write, and do it with some sort of game plan.

If you didn't read the article, it calls for you to make some sort of resolution for this year.  Mine is this: I'm going to have an agent by the end of 2013.

I tend to be really bad with setting arbitrary deadlines, because I tend to be really bad at judging how long something will actually take me. But this, I think is doable.  Here's the breakdown I'm aiming for:

February: Finish draft on Untitled Mystery of Mystery, get to alpha reader.  (I had a much earlier goal for this, but the second half of Act II needs to be completely ripped out and redone, and I'll have to sidestep to give it time to bake.)

March: Get draft back from alpha reader

April: Another round of rewrites

May-June: Recruit and get feedback from beta readers

July: Another round of rewrites

August: Let the querying begin!
 

If I can keep to this schedule, this gives me three months to query, before the return of NaNoWriMo steals my soul, followed by agencies closing down submissions.  With a draft honed by several rounds of rewrites and critiques, that should be plenty of time to pin down representation.  Sure, it's a lofty goal, but sometimes you have to aim high.

I'm also hoping that publicly announcing my plans will make it easier to stick to them, since y'all will know if I fail.  Even if I haven't gotten any results by the end of the year, if I can hold to the rest of the schedule, I'll be feeling pretty good.

So what's your big goal for the new year?  What does your publishing schedule look like?  Do you create a schedule of what you're intending to work on, or do you just wing it?

A Peek at the Process

Click to embiggen.

I've started the rather significant rewrite on my NaNoWriMo project from 2010, which will henceforth be referred to as Untitled Mystery of Mystery until I come up with something better.  (I told you I'm bad at that bit.)  I thought it might be somewhat interesting to show the revision process I've settled on.

Basically, I have the original document on my right monitor, and the new version on the left.  I also have a dead-tree copy of the original document in a binder nearby that's been marked up with notes.  A bit of commentary:

I came up with the dual-document approach when I was rewriting this year's NaNo on the fly and trying not to massacre my word count.  At that point, so as not to cheat, I cut the stuff I was keeping out of the original and pasted it into the revised chapter, leaving the chaff dangling on the end of the manuscript.  This isn't really great for coherent version control, so this time I'm changing the text color on stuff that's been transferred.  That way if I go back through looking for things that have been left behind in the recutting and rearranging, they're still easy to find without turning those orphaned bits into an unholy mess.

Compared side-by-side, you can see the things I've already changed even in this very short snippet.  The big one is that I cut out the first page and a half of the original to skip past Sam waking up.  Starting with a character waking up is one of my major sins, but thankfully one that's easy to purge in rewrites after I've figured out where the story actually starts.

The original first paragraph was entirely passive, all "weres" and "had beens".  While you can't (and probably shouldn't) kill all of them, I did my best to punch it up a bit.  I'll probably be revisiting the first sentence, because first sentences are important, but I'll live with it for now.

One of the significant character notes in the prior trimmed pages is Sam's coffee addiction, which needed to get added back in.  There's more of that description that I like, and will try to find a home for a little later, but for now a brief mention will suffice.

So there's a little hint of how I'm doing things, at least for now.  I might find that other methods of revising help further down the line or with a different project, but we'll go with this for now.