Now that I’ve finished NaNoWriMo2011, I’m going to switch gears: to editing.
I find that my enjoyment of editing swings back and forth; usually what happens is that I hate it until I’m in the middle of it, and then I enjoy it until I get sick of it, and then I hate it again. So I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of time, per story, that I need to spend editing by trying to get better as first drafts, so I have less to work on. This whole writing-fast experiment I’ve been doing over the last year and a half has really seen an improvement in my writing, but not enough that a) I don’t have to do line edits and b) it can magically go back and fix things that I didn’t write well the first time ’round.
Therefore: I’m taking off time from writing new novels in order to get my old ones up and out.
I’m not sure about the short stories. I want to keep writing them, but it takes about eight hours to get a 4K story written, edited, formatted, and posted, and that means I lose a day every week to short stories. I have to keep writing new stories. I’ll have nightmares if I don’t keep writing something new. But I may quit putting them up for a while–I’ll still keep submitting, though. I’ve figured out how to format a pretty clean story and design a not-completely-idiotic cover, so I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve as far as those go.
Here’s what I have:
- Four novels in a chapter book/middle grade series (the character gets older), with a fifth still to write.
- A SF novel of an alien invasion that can only be stopped by beer
- A fantasy novel about a 13-year-old boy investigating the death of his friend, in and out of fairy
- The first book in a fantasy trilogy about a post-WWII nurse trying to prevent the invasion of Nazi mechs from a fantasy universe
- A Japanese teen who steals a sword from the death-goddess and ends up trying to stop an apocalypse started by her dead father (on sub–but it’s been six months with no word, absolutely none)
- A caterer investigating the mysterious slaughter of her desserts (on sub)
- And now, Alice Liddell and zombies
My goal is to get all of these edited (perhaps not posted, but either posted or on sub) by the end of May. I want a clean slate, dammit.