Beautiful Books ~ 2017 Writing Goals

Image Description: A close up picture of a type-writer with the heading of “beautiful books: a link up for writers” up the top of the image. At the bottom of the image is the website urls for Paper Fury and Further Up and Further In

What were your writing achievements last year?
~Self-published my first EBook Canis Major, Volume I of the Pushing Boundaries series (yes, I will shamelessly plug this for as long as possible)

What’s on your writerly “to-do list” for 2017?
~Participate and Win Camp NaNoWriMo in April and July and then NaNoWriMo in November
~Attend the Emerging Writers Festival and/or Melbourne Writers Festival
~Write One Stim Toy Review a month
~Write at least one RecipeYum Article a month (I’m hoping for more but I’m being realistic)
~Read and Review at least two books a month (I’m hoping for more, but I’m being realistic)

Tell us about your top-priority writing projects for this year!
~Orion, volume II of the Pushing Boundaries series
~Andromeda, a collection of short stories focusing on Beth and Mary as teenagers

How do you hope to improve as a writer? Where do you see yourself at the end of 2017?
~A finished manuscript of Orion, Volume II of Pushing Boundaries
~I also hope to improve my attendance at Writer Events/Author Events

Describe your general editing process.
For other authors or other people:
~Print out a hard-copy and go through it chapter by chapter with a red pen, possible write notes or questions on the back of pages.

For my own projects:
~Flail around helplessly and do a terrible job in general (I’m awful when it comes to editing my own work)

On a scale of 1-10, how do you think this draft turned out?
-Insert Chewbacca Noises Here- But in all honesty, I really want to develop the habit this year of sitting down on one day of week (or whenever) and consistently writing, I’m looking into using the Pomodoro Technique.

What aspect of your draft needs the most work?
Well it needs to exist for one thing, but I think it’ll help me if I sit down and down a an outline for it, I was thinking chapter-by-chapter but not too detailed.

What do you like the most about your draft?
Well what I like about the idea behind Orion and the Pushing Boundaries series is that it’s like the first project I’ve been able to consistently work on, that’s kind of amazing for me.

What are your plans for this novel once you finish editing? More edits? Finding beta readers? Querying? Self-publishing? Hiding it in a dark hole forever?
Hopefully by November, it’s finished and is ready for editing and/or Beta reading, but due to the cost of self-publishing I might be forced into only being able self-publish an 60 000 word Ebook every second year, which is why I’ll be writing some short stories in the meantime (and then putting them into their own Ebook later on).

What’s your top piece of advice for those just finished writing a first draft?
Give your draft some space. My biggest problem was that I couldn’t give my WIP Writing Project space due to poor time management skills. I had to write, edit and self-publish all within the space of a year and it did turn out to be a rush job (I really don’t recommend this), however, I’m still proud of what I managed to accomplish. But if I had the luxury of space, I would have had a better and more objective perspective when it was time for editing, so knowing when to let go a project and work on something else for a while (but not too long) is a good skill to develop.

Also Editing will take WAY longer than you could possibly imagine, do your research, find the right resources for you and don’t get discouraged or think you’ll never get to the end of the tunnel, because you will 🙂