I’m hitting that mid-point slog in the novel I’m drafting. Well, the multiple-project experiment du jour. Novels. There are novels. Plural. And I have hit the middle of the one I’m (demonstrably) spending the most time on. The others? Well, not quite there, but all still making progress. So, how about a progress report?

Overall Impressions:

• I’m keeping up a fairly good overall pace. (A little slow the last week or so, but I blame the holidays.) I’m not at Nanowrimo level production, but I have a full novel’s worth of words over the last two months.
• These words are not evenly distributed among my projects. There is a definite favorite.
• I think I’m gaining a lot by having a solid “something else” to work on without much thought, and I do jump between them fairly easily.
• However, the slow down from the last couple of weeks makes me wonder if the midpoint slog is contagious between projects. I’m definitely there for the preferred project, but I shouldn’t be for some of the others.

Project-Specific Impressions:

• I’m probably not cut out to write YA, or anything else for children. You were probably already chortling when I said YA the first time. (Things that likely do not belong in YA? the word “spermatozoa” and any love-triangle that does not result in an either/or choice on the part of the main character.)
• Giving a project a working title like “Wildly Inappropriate” does not result in a high degree of confidence on that project. Possibly changing the working title to something like “You Can Do It!”
• The only project with a well-defined romantic subplot is the one with the Time-Traveling Eunuch. Go figure.
• Top Word Count, 42k-ish.
• Bottom Word Count: 16k-ish.

And On The Revision:

I let myself pause to write a chunk of new material, and that took a lot of the wind out of my sails. I’m still getting fairly close to the end of the first pass through. I have a list of scenes to write, which is good. And I think I’m seeing some of the problems that I missed the last time.

Goals For 2019

I’m always a little hesitant to name goals. I seem to either surpass them so thoroughly that there wasn’t any point in making them in the first place, or I let them fall by the wayside.

I am going to finish my revision and go back to querying. I’m not sure how long that will take. There are some big changes planned, but there is a plan.

I am going to finish drafting one of my new projects. And then, I will keep working on the others until I’m clear-headed enough to revise.

And I will wind up revising that. Which is just the next step in the cycle, of course.

I let the blog drop off considerably in 2018. So… I’m looking for a nice balance between staying active and not spending all of my writing time blogging. I’d like to grow the blog this year, but do so in a sustainable way.

So, that’s it for me. What about you? Any nice goals I can steal borrow?