Writing Goals For 2020

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Working on being concise this year, I’m going to say that most of my writing goals for this year are on the editing and publishing sides of things. While I haven’t worked out the publishing plan exactly, or even very roughly, yet, the editing piece is a big one.

As I’ve suggested in the past, and more than once, I’ve got way too many things in a non-final draft status. I want to move a bunch of those in that direction this year. To that end, I’m taking at least Q1 (and almost certainly Q2) to focus on editing.

Novel-length projects I’d like to get to final draft this year:

1. Big Hair Day = set in the 80s, I’m calling it Historical Fiction. I’m kind of doing things in a weird order this time, taking care of most of the dictation cleanup and other tidying during the revision notes pass. Probably not a lot of big changes in the 2^nd draft, though there are three short scenes I want to add, and a fourth I’m toying with, to make the overall plot smoother.
2. Troll World = a current total length of 320k, the Troll World novels consist of five separate books. Once the editing is complete, and there are a few things I have to add here and there, I expect the length to increase by about 10% overall.
3. A Matter of Honour = Star Trek fan fiction featuring a young Lieutenant Chekov. Converted from audio drama and with a few small tweaks due to the medium change, I think the story works pretty well.
4. Fallen Heroes = final volume in the Heroes Inc. trilogy, but may not be the final story set in that universe. I have a couple of ideas for things to do with some of the other heroes.

From a drafting perspective, I’m keeping things even simpler: 12 shorts and 12 flash pieces, one of each per month. I will return to novels later in the year, but I’m not ready to commit to which yet. I have 30k into the Universal Destiny sequel, and about a 5k on each of two more novel-length ideas. But there are lots of stories I want to tell, so we’ll see where it goes when I get there.

I’m not going to put numbers on story submission or publisher hunts at this point, but both of those will continue, basically at whatever rate I have time for.

There, much more concise than my goal-setting posts for the last couple of years. Which probably just means I’ll get to expand on them later.

Be well, everyone.

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