News: What I'm Working On Now

11/22/17

There are so many wonderful authors out there participating in NaNo.  I see them posting their word counts for the day/week/etc and I am very impressed by everything they've accomplished.  I wish I could emulate them, but I've tried and in the end I decided that NaNo just wasn't for me.  Being on a specific schedule where I have to write X number of words per day with the intention of completing a story by the end of the month doesn't work for me.  Having that much structure instead stresses me out.  I see how much I didn't get accomplished the previous day, add that word count to the amount I didn't get finished that day, and it all starts piling up.  In the end, all I get out of NaNo is stress-induced writer's block which translates into equally ineffective December writing. 

At the same time, I can't say that I've managed to significantly increase the word counts of any of my stories even though I haven't been doing NaNo.  I've done some planning for my stories, including the final fairy tale story I need to write.  I have also read through my currently out of print story Heart's Tournament.  I gave it a minor edit and decided to resubmit it to LT3, but then I came to a dilemma.  The reason I didn't immediately resubmit it when it first went out of print is that I had always planned to write the sequel.  I still haven't written said sequel, but I have started planning the prologue.  The question becomes, do I resubmit now in the hopes that I'll actually write the sequel this time, or do I write the sequel first and then submit them both together?  There's pros and cons to both options, but what it really boils down to is that I already have too many ongoing projects on my to-do list.  Until I finish a few more stories, I really can't start writing this sequel.  Either I have to resubmit and (if LT3 accepts it again) hope I get the sequel completed before it goes out of print again, or I have to hold off for what could be a few years before I resubmit with the sequel attached.  I'll let you all know what I decide. 

I started working on The Red Apple Witch after that and I was just getting into it when I got an email from LT3 with the second round of edits for Kelpie Blue.  Turns out that while some of the things I fixed last time worked, a number of the changes I made either weren't right or didn't change enough.  Technically there's less to do this time around, but it's still a big project.  The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can return to writing.  Please wish me luck.