My Writing Plan for the Month

As I might have mentioned earlier, I have revived my monthly writing bet with one friend for the month of December and will be continuing it in January with another friend. Now that I'm done with graduate school and my magazine internship, I can get started on it in earnest. Thus far I've written 1,700-ish words for two different projects. Hopefully I'll be able to do better, considering last December I wrote nearly 12,000 words.

Here're some goals I hope to reach for the month:

*The Thing in the Woods is 53,000-odd words at present, but the few agents I've sent it off to have said it needs to be longer. My goal is to get to at least 60,000 words this month through judicious adding of a few words per page (much like how I cut, by nicking a few words per page) of extra description, atmosphere, etc. I've also written a new scene that might be 1,000 words or so that I haven't plugged into the main draft yet. Samhain Publishing, a small press that published the novel Shadows in the Mist I really enjoyed, has a minimum of 60,000 for print books. The main way I know as an author to market a book is to do book signings, so having a print book is essential. Plus 60,000 words would put me well ahead of the bare-minimum figure of 55,000 words. 7,000 words is doable, I would think.

*My current project--that I won't go into details with for now--is at 17K words or so. Owing to the nature of the project there's a lot of journalism (playing to my strengths) and telling instead of showing (which is easier to write). I had the notion of finishing it this month, but that might be a little too ambitious. I took a couple chapters to writing group yesterday and spent a fair bit of the afternoon editing based on their suggestions.

*I've got 2,000 words of a bizarro novella or novel involving badgers and heavily-armed little people written. If this is a novella, I might be able to finish it this month. This is the first time I've written comedy in years. Joke topics include badgers, hippies, little people, and even the death of David Carradine. :)

I can already foresee spreading myself too thinly and not finishing anything. So let the games begin.