3 Months of Going Public
This November through January I am going public with my writing progress and plans. The overall objective is to (almost) complete the first draft of my novel and backstrap the outline. Supplemental writing in short story form is also part of this season.
The Pathfinders Writing Collective has provided a good platform to form this as a custom challenge for myself under the #PAWRICO25 challenge.
Often I’ve used November each year to write a full 50K story. That’s how a couple of novels got started previously. But this year, although I’ve joined in with several Novel November events (see my previous post, NovNov and Other November Challenges), I do not have the same intentions.
My Work in Progress, with an unimaginative working title of Cosy Creatures, has been underway over the last six months, mainly written as 600 word short stories for local writing groups. Although I estimate that there’s a good 60% of the story there, I now have plans to complete the first and next drafts with the aim to query etc next year.
November also is filled with two long writing coaching workshops which will also have their own homework, I’m sure. The need to do these, plus organise and analyse what I have and what is missing from Cosy Creatures now means that spitting out 50K in fastdrafting terms is not on the cards.
Instead, the Pathfinders Writing Collective runs a November-January Writing Challenge #PAWRICO25 which is completely customisable. So here’s what I’m doing -
My writing progress will be shared via instagram (which will also hold some snippets of my story world, reading and anything else I consider fun)
November is scheduled for two things - writing (to the coursework, or new draft scenes for the novel, or the final short stories for local writing groups). If there’s spare time, I will also focus on a little bit of plotting and analyisation - I do have to work out the missing scenes and sequence of the all the scenes. Target: roughtly 60K of new words, but not really bothered.
December is scheduled for more organisation - really pulling the full plot together as an outline and synopsis. I’m sure there will also be some new writng too. Target: in hours spent, and completed plot points and status of scenes.
January is free-form. Some new novel work, revision and further organisation. Target unknown as yet, but will probably put it down to hours worked.
Because I’m using TrackBear to track some of this, I’ve setup three projects, one for each month. I’ve tried to set targets for the full three months -
60K+ of new words (Cosy Creatures, coursework and short stories)
40 hours of writing time spent on organisation
expected outcome - novel fully outlined and 90% of scenes drafted and revised roughly; short story package of 6-10 fairytales completed and amalgamated plus there will be extra short stories.
I did not spend much time on picking my path(s)
