Okay, it’s been more than half a year, by a few days. But it’s nice to check in, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’ve realized that outlining novels is not a thing that works for me. I tried for months to outline Witness to the Scourge, and it never worked out. All those years I participated in National Novel Writing Month (RIP)? The best, most successful ones I’ve written were ones that I didn’t outline. Well, okay, I outlined Padma somewhat, but even then it was a light outline that really didn’t give much information. I listed some beats and wrote to those, but that’s about it. But The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, Code Monkey!, And the Devil Will Drag You Under? All of them were not outlined ahead of time. And The X of Doom, my pirate novel, is doing just fine with not outline guiding it.

Sometimes I find it’s best for me to just sit back, put my fingers on the keyboard, think about the story, and just let the Weird Shit happen. I’ve been working on The X of Doom for the whole month now, and it’s working out quite well; I’ve got about 22,000 words written, and I’ve been adding about 1,000 words per day without fail. I mean, there’s no outline; or, is this rough draft the outline itself? There’s Weird Shit going on, more than I’d anticipated, and some of it is going to have to come out. That’s fine. I’m having a blast, and that’s the most important part. This novel has been a lot of fun to write so far, and I’m hopeful that it will stay that way.

Anyway. I did set some pretty ambitious goals for myself for the year, as I recall. Here are some of them:

• Write four nonfiction essays (one per quarter)
• Revise four short stories (one per quarter)
• Revise Padma and get it ready for querying/submitting
• Revise And the Devil Will Drag You Under
• Write first draft of Witness to the Scourge

Checking in, I have…

• Not written any nonfiction
• Revised only one short story
• Not revised Padma
• Even looked at And the Devil Will Drag You Under
• Given up on Witness to the Scourge

The year hasn’t been particularly stressful for me (other than, well, look around), so I don’t really have any excuses other than that these goals might have been more ambitious than I had anticipated. I’m not going to beat myself up, though. I’m going to move forward with updated goals and plans, and we’ll see what happens.

New goals:

• Write one nonfiction essay
• Revise two short stories for submission
• Revise Padma
• Revise And the Devil Will Drag You Under
• Finish first draft of The X of Doom

I think these goals are achievable. The only problem I have with the first one — writing nonfiction essays — is that I can never come up with anything to write about, which is frustrating. I will have to set a new goal: come up with things to write about. I’ll try to come up with two things by the end of the month.

That’s all I got for this blog entry. As they say over at the Escape Artists podcasts: Be safe, be kind, and have fun.