Writing Wednesday: Next Steps

(I’m blogging every day in July as part of NaBloPoMo!)

In June, I hit 250,000 words written for the year* and I feel a little at loose ends about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to finally have established a daily writing practice. I can now fit at least 1000 words into my day without even breaking my stride. BUT, beyond the purpose of establishing the practice, I don’t feel like all of those words have their own purpose because they are not toward a specific project or group of projects. I have a couple of short stories and some bits and pieces of my novels, some essays, and a bunch of flash fiction.

All of those things are good and I’ll make more of them in the future, but it feels a little like I have done so many stops and starts that I haven’t gotten very far along the path to becoming a consistently published writer. So, I’ve been giving some serious thought to which projects I want to dedicate myself to at the moment and I am going to spend my next 115K on those.

What are those projects, you might ask?

After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided that I am going to focus on three writing projects for the next three months:

1) My urban fantasy novel – it needs a lot of revision and a lot more ‘filling out’

2) A group of three short stories to release as an ebook by October 13

3) A weekly entry in a flash fiction contest/post

That’s not to say that I won’t write other things as well, but I’m going to keep those things at the top of my project list and make solid progress. I’ll keep you updated as this story develops. 😉

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Topic Change!

This month’s theme for NaBloPoMo is Connect – a theme I adore because I am ALL about connecting things – ideas, people, places – so that pulled me in. Then, today’s suggested topic twigged for me as well. So even though I had already written the post above for today, I wanted to weigh in on this too:

“Do people generally understand what I am trying to say?”

I think people do understand what I am trying to say but I think it might be tied to the fact that I spend waaaaay too much time trying to figure out the most effective way to say the things I am tried to express. That, in itself, is tied to the fact that I have an almost pathological fear of being misunderstood. It’s not always my favourite feature of my personality and I send myself spinning in circles sometimes, over-explaining something so I can be clear about how I got to this point in the conversation. I frustrate myself with this frequently.

Of course, sometimes it works in my favour – it has taught me to make super simple explanations, usually via analogy, of a lot of complex things. And it has helped me to give serious thought to how I am being perceived and to choose my words and behaviour to match my intentions. So, even if I overdo it sometimes, perhaps the good outweighs the bad.

I think I would prefer when to turn that overthinking on, though!

*I’m part of the 365K Challenge from Katharine Grubb’s 10 Minute Novelists.