Plans

There are two different ways I go about my writing: Planned and unplanned. Basically, a planned piece of writing has a lot of thought put into plot, characters, meaning, that sort of thing, you know, so it's all cohesive. My unplanned efforts are, of course, more spontaneous, more experimental, and more prone to failure. I usually have trouble planning large projects. Sometimes I lose interest, sometimes they just suck, and sometimes they just fall through.

My latest proposal is a little less strenuous than a NaNoWriMo type 50k-in-30-days ordeal, but rather, a 20k novella over the next three months. August, September, October. Then on to NaNoWriMo 2010 (perhaps I'll try writing my JulNoWriMo story again).

So anyway, here's the plan:
I'll have my first draft finished by August 20. That's 1,000 words a day for 20 days, not too hard, considering it'll be alongside uni and work, it's not an insurmountable task. My idea at the moment is an Epistolary narrative of a guy who starts keeping a dream diary when he starts having vivid dreams which are actually sections of a continuous dream from the mind of a young boy in a coma. The working title is "Perpetual Dreaming".

Continuing on the target of 1,000 words a day, I'll go through and rewrite the story, aiming to finish by September 9.

Then I'll spend the rest of September spending time on the weaker parts of the story, tightening the narrative up. That gives me 21 days, three weeks. My third draft, of sorts.

That leaves a full 31 days to spend on editing, going through the whole thing with a fine-toothed comb. I'll probably try to go through it all as early in October as I can, so I can sit on it for a few weeks before giving it one last look-over in the last week of October before submitting it for publication in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

I've been meaning to send something to that magazine since I came across it, but I haven't been able to get a working narrative up and ready. I came back to their site the other day, read through the guidelines again, saw their word limit was 20,000, and I thought I'd take up the opportunity to produce something a bit more ambitious than a simple short story.

I'm also going to send a short story to the Wet Ink magazine by the end of August, so, fingers crossed that all goes well. I'm starting semester two of year two at Uni tomorrow, where I'll be studying writing for performance and experimental writing, amongst other things. Hopefully I'm going to have a busy few months ahead of me.