organization

After taking care of some family business, I spent the rest of the evening organizing things. I have mapped out the rest of the year as far as writing goes. I want to finish some of these works in progress that have been hanging around. I hope I can get most of them finished by the end of the year. I really want to hit this fantasy series hard in 2008, and I can't do that if I have a million other projects waiting to be finished. I'll spend the rest of the year outlining and working on background for the fantasy while I work on finishing the other pieces, and then I can start the actual writing at the beginning of the year. There's something very symbolic about starting a series at the beginning of a year. It just seems right to me. Progress on this series continues. I drew a detailed map of the world last night, and did some research on creatures tonight. I also worked on the world building questions some more. There are 43 pages of questions, and I've finished about half of them. They really make you think about the world you're creating. I wrote the legend tonight, which will probably pop up somewhere in the story, but that's not why I wrote it. I needed it for background. I also did something else tonight... I showed the map to my nephew and told him a little about the story. He's 11 years old, so he would be about the right age, and he loves fantasy novels (big fan of Harry Potter) so I wanted his input on what I'm working on to see if kids like him would like to read it. He sounded very interested. He also had no trouble pronouncing the names of the islands, which was a concern I had, considering the fact that they are all Czech words. I chose ones without accent marks so that they would be easier to read and pronounce correctly. At least, I think I'm pronouncing them correctly!

Anyway, if I can stick to the plan I made tonight (and it's pretty reasonable) I should be finished with most of my current unfinished novels by the end of the year. I've had a lot of success with my inspirational romances during NaNoWriMo, and they are the perfect length for the challenge, that I'm going to write the second in my Faithgirls series then. That just leaves Under the Magnolia Tree (which is going to be longer than I thought, but I only have 30,000 words left to write) and Deadly Council (which will also be longer than I planned.) I updated my wordcount meters to reflect the new goals, and am going to spend some time revising the outlines for the three books I want to finish this year. So that's the plan. I'm going to do everything I can to stick with it. If everything works the way I hope it will, I will have one finished novel (submitted to 2 publishers now, and more by then) and 3 first drafts. In addition to those, I should have enough notes and outlines to start the first Draha book in January.

I'm going to rehearsal tomorrow night, but I'm taking my notebook with me in case I get some ideas. They told me I don't really need to attend rehearsals until tech week, but I'm going to go at least once a week until then so I can be familiar with everything. I'm nervous about this... it'll be my first time running lights.