Category: goal updates

Goal Update: June 2026

June 17, 2026 /

Since October, I’ve further modified my writing goals. Norse City Limits has been put on hold (as mentioned in October), as have all my other fiction writing projects. I’m focusing solely on Shards of Stole Breath (the middle-reader dragon book I’m writing for my children).

This decision came about because I was sick of juggling so many projects and feeling like I never made progress on the “big ones” (aka the novels). My children won’t be young forever, and they won’t necessarily like dragons forever, so I figured finishing Shards was the top priority.

I once considered myself a “promiscuous writer” in the same way I’m a promiscuous reader (i.e.: I read multiple books at a time, flitting from one to the next as the mood suits me). But this kind of flitting in my writing has led to shorter things getting completed while longer things would fall by the wayside. I like writing short stories, but it started to feel as if my short stories were giving me cover to avoid working on the longer, more complex novels.

So in October, I put my goals related to NCL, Ysbaddaden on hold while my Shards of Stolen Breath goal was pushed to the top. However, what’s new here in June is that I’m also putting all my short story-related goals on hold too. Non-fiction, Substack, blogging, etc. are different enough to not compete with Shards, but until I finish Shards, I’m looking to hold off on any other fiction goals at the moment.

Okay, now, on to the goals!

  • Shards of Stolen Breath (middle grade novel): I guess my idea of writing books in “seasons” (stolen from Stephen King) hasn’t quite worked out. Winter has turned into spring has turned now into summer and Shards is still a work-in-progress. I’m about 30k words into the thing, and while I originally thought it would be around 60k, I’m not putting any definitive number on length just yet. If I start thinking it’s a 60k book, I’ll start shaping the story to fit that length instead of letting the story be the length it wants to be. I’m also revising several of these middle chapters because I had a better idea of who some new characters are and what will happen when they try to restore the dragons’ magic.

  • Blog every day: Not even close. Until this week, I haven’t blogged since April. This is partly due to putting more focus on my fiction and Substack, but blogging uses such different writing “muscles” that I could still do it more frequently than I have. My idea of delving into my writing notebooks and “stealing” stuff to put on the blog is probably how I’ll get more blogging done.

  • Send out a Substack newsletter every two weeks: Nope. BUT… I have been more consistent with sending out a Substack each month, especially since I’m doing my Dolmenwood book club. This is where the “fail to succeed” comes into play. I have a goal (perhaps too ambitious) of sending out a Substack every two weeks, and while I’ve failed at said goal, I’m trying to achieve it, which means I’m sending out a Substack every month, give or take. I want to continue striving for every two weeks, but for now, I’m proud of this year’s Substack efforts.

  • Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: I am rocking this one! At least when it comes to family and friends. I’ve been playing at game stores consistently for several months, at least three times per month, and on Sundays, I’ve started GMing a Dolmenwood game for my husband, brother, and cousin. The one area where I’m not making progress is playing with my kids. Now that it’s summer, I think I’ll get some games out and cajole them to join me, especially on rainy days. For the kids: Mausritter, Hero Kids, and maybe some Cairn 2e.

  • Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic Dolmenwood: I’m amending this goal partly due to some ideas I’ve had since starting my Dolmenwood book club on Substack. I realize that with all this reading I’m doing related to the game and its inspirations, that I kinda want to start making content for the game itself. Perhaps a “Goblin Market” module, or something inspired by “Mrs. Mabb”? I haven’t really done much with this goal other than think about it, but if I’m going to dip my toe into making RPG stuff, Dolmenwood feels like the right way to go.

  • Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet. Have sketched out some ideas for what each issue might be about, but other than that, I’ve not worked on this goal.

  • Make other zines: Not yet, but I did do some brainstorming about possibilities. I want to get my kids involved as well, particularly as illustrators. A family-made zine, if you will. This has me quite excited, but the ideas are all embryonic at this stage and need more fleshing out, thought, experimentation, discussion, etc.

  • Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): Yes!!! We finished NIMH, Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, and we’re about to begin Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This has been going very well, and in addition to the above mentioned books, we’re currently reading The Phantom Tollbooth, Skunk and Badger, and The Castle of Llyr. At some point, I hope to return to The Hobbit as well.

  • Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): No, and I’m sad about it. I see my little bag on its hook that has the yarn and naalbinding needles, and I always pass it by. I’m worried that I’ve forgotten how to do it. I think I’ll need to start a little beginners loop and get the hang of it again before I jump back into my son’s winter hat. Maybe by this coming winter I’ll be able to finish it…

  • Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): A little. We bought a box of blank greeting cards so we could make cards for people instead of buying them, and I’ve done two homemade cards using cutesy little creatures I copied out of this book: How to Draw Cute Woodland Friends. I also created two possible characters to be my zine mascots: a pillbug named Pillburt and a preying mantis named Manty.

  • Start a podcast: Nope. Haven’t really thought or worked on it either. I feel like I’m in such a “finish Shards” mode that starting a big project like this feels impossible. Maybe that’s the wrong attitude. Maybe I need to keep pushing on this so that I build momentum. Small daily actions build to big things. I need to remember that (for this podcast goal but also for my fiction writing and everything else).

  • Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: No, and I think what I need to do is not write these ahead of time but write them alongside my students. So, for now, I’ll not be working on these, but when school resumes in the fall, I’ll get back to writing more model texts and drafting in the classroom, in front of my students, so they can see how a writer does it. Both the good and the bad, the ease and the struggle.

This list of goals is much less ambitious than in previous iterations (only 12 items this time), but I’m okay with that. I still stand by having big(ish) goals and “failing to succeed,” but I also realize that when it comes to fiction especially, the number of goals was more a procrastination technique than a productivity one.

Jane Yolen, one of my GOATs, just passed away at 87, and I’m reminded of why she’s such an inspiration: She wrote every possible kind of genre and type, from picture books to novels to non-fiction to poetry, and she wrote with incredible gusto. She was beyond prolific.

I always admire the really prolific ones. Yolen, Bradbury, Sanderson.

But I’m not prolific. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to write at the same volume as my heroes. In the obit I read of Yolen yesterday, she was quoted as saying that there are often two types of writers, the mule team drivers and the horse and buggy writers. The mule teamers can handle several projects at once, whereas the buggy writers finish one thing then move on to the next.

I want to be a mule team driver, but I think I might be a horse and buggy person. Yolen wasn’t critical of the horse and buggy writer, she was simply describing these two types. Sanderson, from what I can tell, is more of a horse and buggy guy, finishing one thing at a time and then switching gears to work on something completely different after each project is completed.

I think I need to experiment with this and see if I’m right about my type. If I can finish Shards this year, and if I can keep going without getting blocked or too bogged down, then perhaps I am better suited to the horse and buggy style. After I finish Shards, maybe that’s when I go back to one of my unfinished short stories. Then, when that’s finished, move on to maybe Ysbadadden. Etc., etc.

But if I stall out, if I find myself struggling and not writing at all, then perhaps I need to reconsider that I may be a mule teamer after all. I’ll know more at the next goal update.

Goal Update: October 2025

October 12, 2025 /

It’s been awhile. I’m going to try and be as upbeat as possible, but the results speak for themselves: I haven’t achieved most of my goals.

And yet! I’ve achieved some, and that ain’t nothing. Failing to success, right? Would I have achieved even these small things if I hadn’t set myself the goals?

Some may argue that yes, I would still have achieved these few things. And perhaps that’s true. Doing small actions every day does tend to add up to bigger things. My students who are writing for five minutes at the beginning of every class are seeing that happen in real-time. Their notebooks are filling up and they can’t quite believe it.

But there’s a part of me that thinks the simple act of articulating the goals helps me understand what my small actions are in service to. For my students, the daily writing added up to a class party (which we just had last week). For me, the daily/regular actions have added up to the completion of a couple of goals and slight progress on a few more. Again: that ain’t nothing.

What This All Means is precisely that it’s good to have some end goals, but it’s also good (better?) to keep plugging away. Achieving the goals isn’t the measurement; doing the small actions is. And not giving up. That’s important too.

Which is all to say that I’m writing this to self-assess, yes, but even more so, I’m writing this to remind myself that I must keep going. Even in a year’s time, I’ve accomplished things. Not much, but some.

And some is better than none.

  • Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel): I must admit that I’ve dropped the ball on this. I’m in that messy middle part in which I loathe every choice I’ve made thus far and feel utterly unsuited to the task of writing a novel.

I’ve taken a pause, honestly. Partly because I need to go back and reread and take better notes on what’s happened, but also partly because I think I need to do more reading/research. The Idea Well has run a bit dry. Problems of output are problems of input, and my Norse mythology/film noir input has been anemic these days (months?). I need to get back in touch with that part of myself.

The difficulty? I’ve started a few new projects and those are vying for my time. I feel the heat to work on them, whereas NCL has grown a bit cold.

I was worried about this, especially over the summer, when the novel was really stalled, but I’ve since made peace with it. This feels like how I work. I’m a multi-book reader, and I’m seeing how I’m really a multi-book writer too. It’s not the most efficient way of doing things, and maybe I need to retrain myself to write with white-lightning heat to finish a novel in a month or two or something, but for now, it seems that my process is more meandering.

It’s not like I haven’t been writing.

Maybe not as many words per week as I’d like, but I’m still writing. I’m finishing stories, I’m starting new stories, I’m writing Substack posts, and blog posts. I’m writing almost every day. Maybe not consumable words, but words that could turn into something later (I use my notebook/morning pages writing for ideas all the time).

I’m trying really hard to stop making demands on my Creative Voice. Instead of saying, “I must write this next chapter of __________,” I sit down at the computer, open a few documents (again, intuitively without deliberate thought), and I start cycling back through a story or start with a fresh page and new words, and I let the Creative Voice do its thing.

In fact, that’s precisely how I started this blog post. I let myself start writing what I felt like I needed to start writing, and an update on my writing goals is where Creative Voice led me.

It takes a great deal of trust in this process to operate like this, but I’m trying to trust it.

A bit like my insight on “inventing the process”: I need to stop prescribing the word count (or the work that “must” be done) and simply do what my Creative Voice wants to do. A story doesn’t have to be x-number of words long. I need to stop even thinking about stories as being “short,” “novella,” “novel,” etc. before I start writing them.

Maybe that’s the trouble with NCL? Maybe I committed to “a novel,” before I really had any idea what my Creative Voice wanted to do with this particular character in this particular world.

Well, anyway, I’m almost 50,000 words into the thing, so it must be something longer than a short story. What that thing is, though, I’m not sure yet. Maybe my idea that it must be 100,000 words long or whatever is getting in my way. Or maybe it’s shaping up to be 200k words or more… I certainly have enough story threads going and no idea how to weave them to a satisfying conclusion… It could end up being a door-stopper!

I’m somewhat tempted to throw a bunch of words out. Partly because I feel like certain choices bug me and I don’t like where they led me, but at the time, I didn’t have the courage to go back and redraft from those (seeming?) missteps. Do I have the courage now? Or is this just a way to avoid finishing?

I don’t think it’s a way to avoid finishing. I think it’s my intuition telling me that maybe I need to trust my gut and not keep putting lipstick on a pig.

Maybe I need to do that process reassessment after all and write with lightning heat…

What would that look like?

  • New Goal: Write an epic fantasy for middle grade readers/my kids (a novel about dragons): This came about because I wanted something for my kids to enjoy that went a little deeper than the dragon books they were bringing home from the library/Scholastic book fair.

I wanted them to have something like I had as a kid, a fantasy series that was epic and archetypal that also didn’t feel watered down. I’m a bit inspired by Katherine Rundell’s thoughts on children’s books and her novel The Explorer in particular, which we listened to as a family on audiobook.

This new dragon fantasy is partly why NCL is on hold.

As I’m typing all this out, I’m thinking I need to heed my own insights about writing one thing with lightning heat… I started this novel (working title: Shards of Stolen Breath) over the summer, and now it’s October and I’m only on Chapter 5. Maybe I need to write with white-heat and finish it as quickly as possible. My boy Thoreau always said, “Write while the heat’s in you.” Don’t let the fire die (hello, dragon pun, I see you).

What does it look like, for me, to write with white-heat?

Does it look like finishing a chapter a day? Write for thirty days, you got yourself thirty chapters. But what if Creative Voice doesn’t want to write a chapter a day? What if she wants to work on that other story that’s been brewing over here for a bit?

Okay, well, I just got done saying I wouldn’t boss my Creative Voice around, but I also wonder if Creative Voice would want to work on Shards every day if I actually, you know, thought about Shards every day. If I wrote about it in my morning pages, and took notes on it throughout the day, and dreamed about it at night.

I have a problem with daydreaming. I’m not doing it enough. I’m crowding out my thoughts with worries and a million other things. I need to schedule some daydream time.

Like, deliberately sit down (or go for a walk) and think about the story. Think about Shards.

I’ll admit that I’ve always been intrigued by guys like Moorcock (and Sanderson too) who can write something in a few days/months. Sanderson has spoken about this before. Write the novel as fast as you can, before the fire dies.

I like systems. I’m tempted to make this system for myself. The daydream about something, write it as quickly as possible, don’t let the fire die. Keep daydreaming so the fire stays stoked. (I swear I’m not writing all these dragon/fire puns on purpose.)

Isn’t it funny how writing all this out has led to insights? I hope they’re insights.

  • Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series): Similar to NCL, this one is on hold. Perhaps it’ll be faster to redraft from word one on this as well. I’m tempted, mightily tempted to redraft from word one both NCL and Ysbaddaden.Do I have the courage to try it? Enough of a fool?
  • Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world: Not yet.
  • Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son: Not yet.
  • Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe: Not yet.
  • New Goal: Finish a short story set in my magical music academy world: Not yet, but almost! I started a story called “Bronwyn Harper” a little while back and I’m getting close to finishing it. Between this story and Shards, I’ve been writing steadily. I also finished a random short story about a dragon egg and submitted that to Writers of the Future, so I need to remember that I haven’t been idle simply because I haven’t finished one of my big novels.
  • Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series: Not yet. Maybe never? This was a thing my Creative Writing students challenged me to do, but I’m not loving it. Time will tell.
  • Blog every day: I am not blogging every day, but I am still blogging. I like that this is a place I can continue to return to. I still aspire to blog every day, but it’s okay if I don’t.
  • Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks: Not yet, but I’m getting better. I’m prioritizing it a bit more. I’m looking through my notebook each week with an eye toward what can go on the Substack, and I’m loosening up my internal “rules” for what I should write about. The topics and essays are a little more wide-ranging, and I find this suits my personality and writing goals better.
  • Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: This is happening and I couldn’t be happier! I just played a one-on-one session of Caverns of Thracia with my eight-year-old son the other day, and it was glorious. And now that my Dolmenwood stuff has arrived, I’m ready to start up campaigns with family and friends. As a family, we’ve been playing Mausritter, Hero Kids, and DnD 5e. I’m also playing in a regular Shadowdark game, and I’m running Thracia as an open table at a FLGS This has been an unqualified success.
  • Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic: Not yet.
  • Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet.
  • Make other zines: Not yet.
  • Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): I was doing this, and then we stalled, and now I’m ready to make this a priority again. I think we need to force our kids a bit on these. They are sometimes reluctant to listen to these older books, but we think it’ll be good for them. First up, NIMH and A Horse and His Boy, then a retry with The Hobbit.
  • Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): Ugh, not yet. I want to prioritize this. My son’s head will be too big if I don’t finish soon!
  • Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): Hmm… a bit? Not much, though. Need to do more daily drawing.
  • Start a podcast: This is a new goal, but I have an idea I’m excited about and which I think my readers will really like. New goal for 2026 is to actually record the episodes and maybe even launch.
  • Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: Not much, and I’m wondering if I want to keep this as a goal. I’m not saying I never do this, but I don’t think I need to set it as a goal for myself. I can write things as needed and dictated by the students I have each year. But making it a personal goal feels like an unnecessary step. I’ll do the work if I need to as part of my day job; no need to “focus” on it here.
  • Bonus achievement: The dragon egg story I wrote on a whim and submitted to WotF. I was using a writing prompt, thinking it would just be an exercise, and then it turned into a whole story. Just goes to show that “practice” for writers can turn into real work (as is true for nearly all artists). Who knows if it’s any good, but I had fun writing it.

Goal: Finish Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess

January 3, 2025 /

This one was always going to be a challenge. It’s a tortured history, and I might not be ready to confront it.

I wrote the first Merlin book in roughly 2014-2016 (exact dates are fuzzy because it was so long ago, which is exactly why my goal to finish Ysbaddaden is so fraught).

That was almost ten years ago, when I published The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Not too long afterward, in January 2017, I wrote a Merlin prequel short story, and I started the second book of the trilogy, a book about the giant Ysbaddaden, a chess game between Merlin and his arch-nemesis, and the continued hunt for the treasures of Britain.

Yeah. It was gonna be great. It was gonna rock. I was gonna finish this book and get it out, then write the third one and have a complete trilogy and be awesome, yay, yay, yay.

Then, after I had completed the trilogy (so my plan was planned), I was gonna write more. So much more. Dozens more. Dozens upon dozens. Ideas for more books, more series, more stories. I had so much more I wanted to write.

So, while I was excited about the Merlin trilogy, I also had plans for more. I needed to get “through” the Merlin stuff to get to all the other stuff I wanted to write.

I was excited for Ysbaddaden, yes, but I was also nervous about it. It wasn’t something I had a clear idea about plot-wise. I knew roughly what I wanted to see happen, but I also wanted to discover new things as I wrote. This is my way. Discovery writing.

I started writing, started the journey roughly in 2017, but then life stuff happened. Another pregnancy happened. And the excitement of the Merlin trilogy began to chafe against my unclear idea of what would happen with Ysbaddaden. In those days, I didn’t have a good handle on how to deal with “stuckness” as a discovery writer. And I was stuck. Stuck physically (with the pregnancy), stuck emotionally (also with the pregnancy), and most especially stuck with the story.

I didn’t like the direction Ysbaddaden was going. And I couldn’t find time to write.

This went on for at least a couple of years. Honestly, I have a bad memory, so I’m not sure when things really started going off the rails, but off they went, and soon enough I realized I needed to scrap twenty-thousand words and redraft huge sections of the work-in-progress.

The redrafting was better, and I started to find a good footing with the story, but then two of my side projects started to become main projects. I finished Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion during the time when I was “supposed” to be finishing Ysbaddaden.

By 2023, I had published those two side project books, but I still had a half-completed manuscript for the second book in a trilogy I first started publishing in 2016. And instead of barreling ahead with Ysbaddaden, I decided to start ANOTHER book, Norse City Limits.

So, as I indicated above. Fraught.

This is probably a Critical Voice problem. Fear that the second book will be worse than the first. Fear that my ideas are stupid and I’ll ruin the series.

But even more than fear, I think what’s happened is that I’ve lost the momentum. I can already tell that momentum is starting to wane with NCL too. Turns out, I need to keep momentum going on a project or else risk losing interest. I’m like a kitten or puppy, distracted by every shiny thing that comes my way.

Going forward, with new projects, the key will be to keep the momentum going and not get too rolled by hiccups and life events.

But for these older projects, for the eternal project that is Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, I need to somehow regain the momentum. With NCL, I think I’ve managed it, but only time will tell. My goal is to finish it by March. Then, it’s on to Ysbaddaden, trying to finish it in the second quarter.

Regaining momentum on a long-delayed project is not easy. Frankly, I’m not sure how to do it. The best I can figure is the old stand-by for when I feel creatively stalled: More input.

If (for both NCL and Ysbaddaden) I can start reading and watching and listening to stuff that fuels my creative voice, then I might be able to rev the motor and restart. Reignite.

The NCL input list includes the aforementioned Myths and Symbols book by H. R. Ellis Davidson, as well as a long list of film noir (a list I might post on the blog in a soon-ish timeframe).

For Ysbaddaden, the list includes The Sandman comics, tons of medieval romances like Tristan and Isolde, the Lais of Marie de France, and Parzival. And, of course, the ur-text for all my Welsh Arthurian stuff: The Mabinogi. Throw in some Tennyson, some T. H. White, and maybe even some Susan Cooper, and add a dash of my favorite old fantasy films like Labyrinth and Excalibur, and I’ll be good to go.

This the hope, anyway. Maybe this time will be different.

I do know that I need to stay connected to the story once I start writing it again. I have to work on it a little bit every day so that the momentum never falters too much. And I have to keep the whole thing fun. Momentum and fun. I’m learning that these are MY key factors for finishing. Momentum and fun.

I think what hurt me way back in 2017 was that I was overwhelmed with life stuff and the writing was harder and harder to fit into my life. I made the book “important” and put myself under pressure to write it. The importance and the pressure and all the personal stuff just stalled me. And instead of being gentle with myself and going easy on the self-criticism, I went self-critical HARD. I beat myself up for my lack of progress, and that made progress all the harder to come by.

I’ve grown a lot as a writer since 2017. I know how to handle stuckness a little better, and I know that I’m really doing quite a lot, actually, so I don’t need to beat myself up about it. The most important thing is that I haven’t given up.

Goal: Finish Norse City Limits

June 9, 2024 /

My top writing goal for 2024 is to finish my novel, Norse City Limits. Inspired by both my love for Icelandic sagas and my love for film noir, NCL mixes elements from Grettir’s Saga and Norse mythology with some of my favorite noir tropes.

I started out writing it late last summer and made a lot of progress right out of the gate. I guess I was excited about starting something new. The idea for NCL has been rattling around my brain for years, so that build-up and energy just flowed right through me when I finally started drafting. I think I wrote roughly 15,000 words in those first few weeks.

Then the school year started and I began teaching again. That slowed things down considerably, and because I wasn’t outlining my chapters as I went, I ended up forgetting a bunch of stuff as my momentum stalled and I didn’t write everyday.

I wrote a short story, started another short story, started a novella, and then went back through and reread all of the NCL manuscript thus far, taking notes and outlining each chapter.

After that process, I finally resumed drafting the novel, but with a bit of a twist. The school year started with me wanting to experiment with having the students draft by hand. Basically do all their writing in notebooks and on pads of paper. This was my way of resisting AI, I guess. Of getting us all to think more intentionally about our bodies and how doing things by hand shapes how we think.

I realized that while I do a lot of writing by hand, mostly in my writer’s notebook, I was still drafting all my fiction at the computer. I can type faster than I can handwrite, and typing just made sense. Saves times, right?

But that meant that I could only write when I had access to my computer, to the desktop that sits in our basement. That meant that my writing time was limited to those moments when I was home and could steal away to the basement to write.

Translation: I didn’t get a lot of writing done once school started because I didn’t have access to my computer. And even when I did have access to it, sometimes I didn’t feel like holing myself up in the dank, cold basement. Sometimes I wanted to sit on the couch with my husband in the evening, just to be near him, to spend quiet time together.

After watching this video on Neil Gaiman’s writing routine, I realized that I really love writing in my writer’s notebook, and writing by hand has always made me feel more experimental and loose, AND I was asking my students to draft their writing by hand, but I was still shackled to my computer, so the answer seemed obvious.

I needed to start drafting my stories by hand.

I took out the lovely leather notebook case my husband got me a few years ago, stuck a couple of Moleskine softcover journals in it, and started drafting NCL and my short fiction by hand. I started bringing the notebook with me to work, drafting in spare moments at lunch or after school. I sat on the couch in the evenings and drafted while my husband worked on his grad classes.

Basically, I got back into the groove with the novel.

At this point, I’m on chapter ten but not quite sure how many words because I’ve drafted the last chapter by hand. Probably getting close to 30k words. Which is admittedly not a lot. I’m thinking this book will be roughly 100k words, but that’s always hard to say until I get closer to the end. I don’t outline, so I’m simply going by the vague impressions I’ve generated for where the story might go and the scenes I have floating around my head.

Right now, my protagonist is stumbling and fumbling along, trying to be proactive but getting swatted down at every turn by the cruel forces at work in the city. It’s weird writing noir because it’s such a dark genre/style that calls for bad luck and evil fate to circumvent the hero’s actions. I want to be careful that my main guy gets some feeling of progress going even as the net squeezes tighter and tighter around him.

To finish the novel in seven months, I must write roughly 10k words per month. Very doable… except I also have the goal to finish another novel (Ysbaddaden) and even more stories besides. So 10k a month for NCL, but that won’t be all I’m writing each month.

As always, I’m hoping to “fail to success,” so no matter where I am by next month, I’ll be further along than I am now.

Original header artwork

Copyright 2015 Chloe Bensinger

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