Tuesday continued on from Monday in that I carried on doing short story planning work. I couldn’t get the dates to work out, though, and spent a lot of time starting again and going back to the beginning. It took my literally all day because I also had to build in the 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS attempts.
The longshot, in the end, was that every 4 weeks I have a week off from the schedule and spend the entire week just working on the story for 12 STORIES. I’ve tried to leave 2 weeks between the initial brainstorming for everything else and then the planning. If I have a week’s holiday, or if a 12 STORIES week pops up, then I have 3 weeks in between. But the 12 STORIES week is an intensive 1-project week – for short stories.
I think it will work, but I haven’t gone barmy, only adding in 6 stories for now, plus pegging time for 12 STORIES for May, June and July. April is due next week, so that’s what I’ll be working on this week. All I have is the prompt, the word-count (500 – should be a doddle), and the deadline. As mentioned yesterday, the plan is to have this kickstart something with a bit more meat to be tacked onto the regular schedule, at the end.
That means I’ve allocated project time to 10 short stories all together, including April’s 12 STORIES, but 4 of those (the 12 STORIES) will be pre-writing for something else, if you get my drift.
Now that I had a solid plan for this week, I transferred it to my diary and made sure I had T-cards for each of them on the Nobo board. I currently have a bit of a bottleneck on the Nobo board at the moment, right at the start under ‘percolating’ (brainstorming). But everything is on there, *everything*. Including 4 blank T-cards for the 12 STORIES that don’t yet have titles, even.
I took one short story T-card down and crossed it out because I was going to make it a novelette (THE LAST PIRATE OF PENZANCE). I turned it around to use the other side, and then I realised that, actually, a novelette still makes it a short story. I’d written out a new T-card in the colour for novellas, but now I think that one will be crossed out and turned around instead.
My novelettes will be 10,000 to 20,000 words, as the anthologies take stories of 5,000 to 20,000 words. My novellas will be around 40,000 words, and my novels will start at around 75,000 words. I don’t really want to start a new row on the Nobo board for novelettes as it’s unlikely I’ll write more than one or two at a time. But I’m thinking now that they’re closer to short stories than they are to novellas.
Some of the anthologies are looking for 3,000 to 5,000 words, so those will fall under short stories too. (My short stories are usually between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and my flash fiction can be as low as 800 words.)
And that was about it for the self-indulgent mechanical organisation stuff. I had editing work to do, and fannying around with T-cards and Nobo boards and lists wasn’t getting that done. Today that needs to change, and I’ll get as much as I can done before the end of the week. But next week, I think I’m going to start work on the Undercover Project. I’m hoping that will take around 5 weeks of morning time.
My learning this week
I spent a lorra, lorra time on learning in the past week, but it was mostly centred on the cosy mystery and creating the template in Scrivener. It also meant a lorra, lorra reading too, more on which tomorrow.
Monday morning I watched a webinar on how to make novellas make money and I printed off the companion pdf.
Other than that, I’ve hardly done any learning at all this week, and the time I’d allocated for next week and the week after was temporarily removed while I sorted out the short story-writing schedule. It was just easier to take everything out and put everything back in again from scratch.
I’ll see how my work goes before putting the learning back in again.
Now that you have your system in place, you can fly!
Yes. I’ve been doing so much planning and organising, I think I’ve forgotten how to do the writing part. No excuses now.