I keep making a plan to update my website more frequently…or at the very least, more regularly. Somehow, it never quite comes together. Maybe in 2016…

Right now, I’m thrilled to be coming out of my first NaNoWriMo win. The first time I tried was about ten years ago, and I’ve signed up almost every year since then with the same outcome: Somewhere in week 2, I forgot I was doing it. This is my problem with many, many things in life, as I’m guessing it is for a lot of people. After all, they say it takes upwards of three weeks to make something a habit. Getting to three weeks, then, has to be pretty tough or there wouldn’t be a zillion books and blogs and professionals out there designed to help us build strong habits.

For me, November was the third month in a row of appreciably increasing my monthly word count, so 50k was bound to happen eventually. Still, it felt like tripping over a threshold. Yes, I’ve hit 50k in a month previously. Last December when I was writing the first half of Eternally Born, I know I hit it even though I didn’t keep track. But last month, I was keeping track. And for some reason that feels like it made all the difference. It feels like I’m going to do something with it this time.

It’s now been a year since I started publishing The Eternals, too, and two since I published my first novella, One For All. I have yet to make either of those go where I’d planned – my serial is only half done, still waiting for the first arc to be completed, and 13 Colonies is patiently awaiting the next novella in the series. Part of me…okay, all of me…really wishes I could have done more with that time. But I also realize that life happens, plans fall apart, and what matters is that I’m still writing, still planning, still moving forward. It’s not the most successful career yet, but dang if I don’t get a gold star for perseverance!

I gave myself three months to focus solely on writing. I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, but I’m going to close out the year with over 200,000 words. That’s its own milestone – there may have been a year I wrote 150k when I was first trying to get published, but that was a long time ago. So I’m pretty excited about that, too! If I’d been working on other projects or focusing on completing them, that would be two full novels, more or less. As it is, it’s half a serial and three-quarters of two novels. Oops.

Now that I’ve had those three months, though, I have other things that need my attention. As we turn over into 2016, I’m trying to do better than I did those last two years. Rather than trying to work harder, I’m working smarter. The last two years proved to me that January and February are bad months for my creativity. They’re usually bad months for me in general, full of bad mojo, illness, and anxiety. They tend to be the worst months of the year, in fact. So much so that I have an ironclad prohibition against making major decisions between Christmas and the second week of March. This year, instead of trying to power through it, I’m going to back off and let myself coast. I’ll be hitting the gym to build up some nice, anxiety-busting endorphins. Still writing, but on a smaller scale with simpler goals.

So, that said, I’m trying hard to finish at least one of my current projects before the year is out. I was really hoping to get my serial finished this month, too, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. 😦

The one that makes me happiest is first on the docket, a contemporary fantasy filled with awkwardness and laughter. I’ve never made myself laugh so much while writing. In fact, I might even go so far as to call this book funny, which heretofore I never believed I could do. It’s a creativity-stretcher for that reason, but it’s also a lot of fun. Tentatively, I’m calling it “Wand For Hire.” It’s the story of a thirty-something who, completely out of luck, takes a temp job that lands her in the middle of a corporate war in the magic world…and finds that she’s signed herself into becoming a fairy godmother. It’s full of sexual innuendo, thanks to her gutter-brained sidekick, and I’ve never done silly like this. It’s fun!

The other is the first in a series that was supposed to walk the line between romantica and solid fantasy. It was supposed to be romantic, each book about a woman who falls in love with a dragon, and together they will all go save the world. Straight-forward, simple. Except those two concepts are not generally synonymous with the way I write. 😛 I knew somewhere around the second sentence out of my fingers that it was going to be something different. The writing was lyrical epic fantasy, the kind of book I loved so very much as a teenager. You know, back before grimdark turned everything all twisted and despairing. And the more I wrote, the more I discovered that the relationships that mattered most were not the women and their dragons – though those are definitely important – but the women and their sisters, their mothers, their families. It took me a good 70,000 words before I realized I was writing a lovely blend of women’s fiction and epic fantasy (and that I had inadvertently written two books into one, and lost 20k from my first book word count to book 2. I have a real problem with that…). It got hard to keep writing after that. One, because I suddenly needed to find the book’s plot without the subplot that was actually the central plot of book 2. And two, because it suddenly carried weight it hadn’t as a simple romance. It meant something. I needed to come at it from a different perspective, and that…well, it wasn’t difficult to do as much as it was to accept. Sometimes, I’m awfully stubborn…

So, those are my current projects. I’m hoping to finish both of them by the end of January, but all my plans fall apart in January so I don’t expect to get anything done until March. Ideally, I would like to release a new 13 Colonies novella for Valentine’s Day, too, and then release every two or three months until I have the room in my schedule to write the novels. Perseverance, baby. It’s all about perseverance. 🙂