Saturday, January 17, 2015

Merry Go Round Blog Tour: What to do in 2015?




      I suspect this is a sign of how 2015 is going to go in general, because I am late with the first post to this round of the tour. Dare I even make plans for a year where I am already falling behind?
Might as well live dangerously.
Every December I make certain I've finished up everything for the year. That means completing whatever drafts I am working on, tidying up outlines, and completing edits. When January 1 dawns, I am free to do whatever I want. It's a whole new year with nothing that has to be finished. I started with a lovely new sf novel a little bit after midnight on January 1.
But you know, I haven't really thought much about plans for the rest of the year.
Oh, there's the usual stuff. Write new things. Publish older things. I am determined to get at least one paper bound book out this year, which means really and truly setting down with InDesign and working my way through the entire process, not this start and stop stuff I've done for the last two years. Silky will be the first print publication, and if all goes well, there will be others.
I have changed the release dates for the new issue of Vision to get it away from the start of the year when everything is so crazy. The new first issue of the year is February 1. I may only do three issues a year from now on. This is year 15 for the ezine and it is getting very hard to get new articles. I'll work something out.
I plan for my first ebook novel release to be in March. This is a new approach for me, not to have something new coming out each month (short stories or longer novels as they get done) like I did for the last four years. Truthfully, I've run out of the 'easy' things to publish, the ones I'd had mostly finished and prepared for submission to agents and publishers. Now I'm delving into newer material that is still in the first draft stage and will take longer to process. I have 54 publications right now, the first published on February 7, 2011. That has been a lot of work.
Currently I'm working on a number of new things, all of them at different levels of completion, and requiring different types of work. It's easy for me to move from one to the other when they're in that vast array of The new sf novel, Home Year 1: Crash is moving along at about 500 words a day; a purposely slow approach to this one until I can get the real feel for the world and the characters.
I'm rewriting a fantasy novel called A Plague of Rats which is kind of up and down. There are parts of it that are really good, and other sections that I keep cutting out completely that are just dead boring.
During all this I got an idea for a new urban fantasy (Outcasts: Sleeper Awake) that looks like it could be a series if I want. I've been jotting down a few notes here and there -- and now I have about 5k in notes. LOL.
Weekly flash fiction stuff . . . Finishing off an sf/adventure called Company Policy, which is down to the last two or three entries. Since it's flash fiction, each entry is just a bit short of 1k. Those have been fascinating to write. I'll do a few weeks of independent stories, and then probably start the flash fiction serial sequel to Going Elsewhere. (Yay! Edmond the talking cat will be back!)
I also have the final, nitpicking edits on In the Shadow of Giants for February release and Silky for the print copy.
Yeah, I'll be busy for a while.
And by the time I'm done with all that, I'll have a dozen more things I want to do. Then there is the daily photo blog (just short of 3000 entries right now) which is hard to keep up in the winter when I don't go out much and we've had virtually no snow. Getting new pictures each day isn't easy in those cases. (Here, kitty kitty. Okay, teddy bears, then. Or maybe the shelves of tea again? How about pictures of pictures!)
Oh and that brings us to art stuff. I've been playing with new programs and I've been so enthralled with them that they've actually taken time away from writing for the last week or so. It's been wonderfully exciting and fun, because I get to work with my 150,000 photos (I am not exaggerating. I have them cataloged in Adobe Lightroom, which is a wonderful program)and make art prints out of them. This has been a lot of fun and a good thing to get me away from writing for a bit each day. Yes, even I need a break from it now and then.
So this might be my year for art.
And photos.
And writing.
Sounds normal to me!

Check out the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour for more posts by writers!

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