The new project: my slipstream fantasy crime novel, working title: All That Glitters, has begun.
I spent the last week revising the synopsis, adjusting the outline and making sure I knew enough about the characters.
There’s a point when all of that planning starts to feel like procrastination. I’ve decided that’s the point I should start writing and so today I wrote the opening scene. It feels pretty good to be working on fresh material.
As part of the state of the writer posts I’m doing here, I have added the project tracker back onto the side bar for the purposes of keeping me honest and I’m aiming to hit my 110k word count target by the end of April. From here I’m trying to build towards a duel schedule in order to reduce the elapsed time to a submission-ready draft and so I’m intending to use the short story I wrote in January to test if I can managed editing in the evenings at the same time as composing. This is a bit of a stretch with a demanding day job but I think I need to try it. At the moment I have a section of the year blocked out for revisions, just in case this doesn’t work.
Initial feedback from beta readers of Forever is more positive than I anticipated, proving that it probably was the right time to get some feedback as I had lost all critical distance from it, if I ever had any. The plan on that is to take it through another revision based on their feedback and then test it against one more reader before seeing if I can find a home for it. I’m still undecided what to do with The Scarred God though I would be lying if I said that Angry Robot’s submission window hadn’t caught my eye.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I should be writing.