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Summer Writing Goals

Summer is strange. After months of back-to-back writing challenges, there's... nothing. Bright mornings, long evenings. Normally every other weekend would be filled with weddings, graduation parties, barbecues and potluck lunches. It would make writing hard. No one wants to plan an event during the time of the year when most of us are busy relaxing and visiting family.

It makes this summer extra strange. After months of pushing myself, I have two WIPs, a bucket full of free time, and no one to hold my nose to the grindstone.

My first WIP is closer to a manuscript - I'm on my fifth draft of my monster-cave-girl story. I received feedback from my beta readers and have a half-page list of issues to resolve. Once I added those notes in to my individual scene cards, I ended up with 31 scenes to make edits to and one full chapter to rewrite. Once those are done, I'm planning to try the change the font and read-through strategy that I've seen people speak of on twitter. When all of those tasks are done, I plan to do one full in-order read through, and then I hope to be ready to query.

Though I've queried in the past, I've never gone through so many steps to review my work. I'm impatient. I hope that this will be a good lesson, though.

In my second WIP (Brigadoon retelling), I just finished my first draft. It took me a full month to write it. Unlike my monster-cave-girl WIP whose first draft was only 35,000 words, this one came out at 67,000. I spent the last week filling in my scene summary cards. My plan for this one is to condense those scene summaries in to a synopsis, and then work on a structural edit plan from there.

I'm still struggling with the timing of these two projects, and trying to decide what to work on first. I had originally planned to try to get my cave-girls ready in time to submit to pitch wars in September, but maybe I will query instead and try to get my Brigadoon-retelling ready to submit to pitchwars. The next round of 20kin5days will also happen in September. I have a little over 2 months until those 2 events. In theory I'd like to be one draft father in each project by then. Without a solid direction, I don't think that's likely - but I am hopeful that by the end of this week I will be able to make a decision on which one to focus on.
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