Roadmap for 08

Over the last few weeks and months, and in light of my recent spate of consistent production I have began to muse about my writing plans for the future.

This is quite new to me – previously there has been a distinct lack of plan or structure when writing. Now I’m more comfortable with my new methodology i.e not starting writing until the story is plotted I feel I can apply this format to plans beyond the current piece of writing into an overall game-plan.

So, what’s in the immediate pipeline?

Bullet With Butterfly Wings.

This is complete as of yesterday, so I need to focus on production and website stuff.

Warp Factory.

This, I estimate, is six weeks away, maybe less. Then comes the editing. And then more typos. Bastards.

Begin Stand-Off.

Or City of Lost Light; I’m torn on the title. I like Stand-Off purely down to the fact it’s the first name that occured to me when I started. City of Lost Light sounds overly familiar – I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere. Titles normally occur to me before I start writing; when they don’t I have trouble thinking of one. This mocks my writing sensibilities.
This is the one I’m looking forward to. The story is plotted and written down- bar the (quite nutty) ending. I think there’s 2-3 months work here.

Beyond

Short stories.

Throughout 2008 my plan is that I produce 2 or 3 (hopefully more) short stories – and by short I mean 2-3k words. I love the longer ones, don’t get me wrong but I need to start writing saleable product. A few stories pumped out and put straight out to pasture will help get the blood flowing, er, ink-wise.

Novella – K&M
K&M is my stab at a Robert Rankin/Terry Pratchett comedy, replete with uniquely-named police officers, ex-war criminals, a possessed village, an Egyptian god or two and the equally weird inhabitants of the Suffolk village Bentley-Barnes. This is a good sized story – I’m thinking 20 or 30k in size. The plot exists somewhere – I just need to remember to dig it out. The story actually came from a screenplay I wrote for the laugh about 8 or so years ago. The idea has stuck with me ever since…I hope to do it justice.

An actual full length novel

Beyond that I’m going to start a novel. I don’t have an idea yet, and the novels I’ve attempted to write in the past have failed due to bad planning and misunderstanding the process (i.e I’m not Stephen King and can’t just write from beginning to end without plotting first) of a novel. Plus my ideas weren’t that hot. Hopefully, with a full year of consistent writing behind me I can hit a rich vein of creativity.

In the meantime I will continue to refine and re-submit existing work where applicable. The market is slow, tough, and themed (i.e. unless you have a story about mechanical dinosaurs for our next issue we’re not interested) so the only solution is a persistant, discipline approach to finding and selling my work.

PS, what is with the god-damned formatting on this web-site? WordPress is horrible when it comes to editing. Completely unforgivable.