Interim Progress
Earlier I wrote I was in the process of shifting my writing year to the calendar year and October through December were bonus months before starting a new writing year. Now that December is over it’s time to quickly assess this three month period and look forward to the new calendar year.
In the last three months I finished editing a novella and wrote twenty-one thousand new words split over three new stories. And these last three stories explore new sub-genres for me: hard sci-fi and humor.
I’ve found hard sci-fi takes considerably more time to write due to all the research. In particular I wrote a story for the Jim Baen’s Memorial Writing contest which wants hard sci-fi space stories set no more than fifty, sixty years in the future. It seemed I couldn’t get more than one or two paragraphs before having to stop to read academic papers on various things, which while the scientist in me enjoyed, the writer in me that likes to make progress resented the delay.
Humor is quite the challenge to write, but I am convinced it can be learned. Although it sounds strange, I did spend time studying humor, deconstructing it, watching videos to try and understand it. I can’t claim to have been successful yet, but it was interesting learning experience. Both hard sci-fi and humor represent two new areas of growth for me and I’m happy to have grown my repertoire and will continue to practice both into 2014.
I also received my first acceptance to a SWFA approved market for one of my most favorite stories, so needless to say I am very excited. The tentative date to publication is in early 2014 and I’ll write more about it then.
And after much introspection and going back-and-forth I finally settled on my writing 2014 targets which I’ll roll out next week.
I am pleased with the progress these past three months, but I can’t wait to get started on 2014. I’ll roll out 2014’s targets next week.
Comments are closed.