The 2021 Writing Roster – The Climb #662

Tuesday 16^th December 2020

I need to start creating some codewords for my various writing projects. It’s not that I want to be all super secretive, it’s simply that as I plan and gather ideas, I want to collate everything under one name. Most of my projects don’t have titles; that comes much later for me. And “Book About A Mage, I’m not sure what yet” isn’t a great project title.

Sometimes a book has a name (rather than a title); or at least something to work with. Mostly, when the ideas are still being gathered it might just be “urban Fantasy Project” of which I might have 3.

I’ve started blocking out next year. This is based on a utopia that’s never going to happen, but the idea is that I want to be working on a number of projects over the course of next year. Each project can be one of three stages: Outlining, First Draft, Editing / Redraft. These I estimate take 2, 6 and 4 weeks respectively – although its going to vary massively based on the project.

I don’t want either two of the same stage or two of the same project next to each other, and so it’s taken a spreadsheet with weeks for rows to block weeks out to come out with a production flow.

I estimate that by the end of January, the schedule will already be off, but the idea is to have a plan first, to stick to it second. If all goes well, I’ll end up with 4 new novels. If I get 2, I’ll be happy.

I know what several of these novels are, but some are still blank slots. My idea is that I want to be gathering ideas for one while editing another.

I also got another big batch of writing done again today. Working in blocks is proving super-productive. Even when things seem to fall apart, I’m getting a good 1400 new words on the draft. Of course, I’d like that to be higher and the plan is to scale up.

I have myself a nice little working environment now, and I feel happy when I write. Not that I didn’t feel happy before, I just felt the pressure of finding time for one big writing slot, rather than several over the course of the day.

The plan now is to get this draft of the novel done, before working on the outline for something entirely new. Hopefully by Spring I should be on rewrites of a novel I’ve already drafted and from there I hope to have a bit of a production line going.

How well it works has yet to be seen, although I suspect it’ll be far from perfect. That said, if I can continue to scale up the writing, there’s no reason I couldn’t. I feel 2020 saw me learn a lot about the craft of writing that I’ve yet to prove to myself.

I might just be surprised. But even if I’m not, I’ll take whatever output I can.

I just need to decide what I’m going to name all the projects.