Thursday, March 3, 2011

Goals for a New Year

This is the sort of thing that should normally be posted at the beginning of the year. As usual, I'm a little behind.

I have, however, been thinking hard about what I want to accomplish this year. I still have a novel in revisions that's this close to being ready to submit. And another novel that's waiting for a rewrite. Plus all the stuff in the Unfinished Trunk.

It's all going to have to wait.

This is not to say that I won't be working on the novel-in-revisions this year. Only that my goal this year is publication. Yeah, I know. That was my goal last year. But last year I was determined to write newer better stuff and get it published. This year I'm setting my sights on taking what is already written, giving it a little bit of polish, and finding markets for it.

Simple, yes?

I've already been pulling out some older short stories and dusting them off. There's a lot of dust. And a fair amount of work that needs to be done before they will find a new home.

But no one said this writing thing was easy.

4 comments:

Mark Fenger said...

I followed the link from your story post on Absolute Write. Do you write steampunk exclusively? I am just getting my steampunk novel ready to sub, hopefully (fingers crossed so hard they're dislocated) it will be ready at the end of the month.

I look forward with interest to see if you get one of your stories published. Good luck!

- Mark
http://brassbolts.blogspot.com/

A.G. Carpenter said...

Hey, Mark.

I write all sorts of speculative fiction, but steampunk is a favorite theme. (Big fan of Dickens here.)

Good luck with your novel. I've been working on mine for two years and it's still not quite "there" yet.

Mark Fenger said...

Two years! You must have a lot of patience. Have you subbed it anywhere yet or are you still waiting for it to hit a certain level of quality?

A.G. Carpenter said...

It's not subbed yet. The rough draft was very rough and took a lot of work to get up to a point where I think it needs to be. Then I had a beta reader suggest that certain elements would best be put aside for a later book.

Now, I'm tightening up the story and focusing on making my MC more active. It's really so much better in the newest draft that I don't mind spending more time on it. It's just frustrating not being finished yet.

Of course, during the past two years I've also written a couple dozen short stories, a rough draft of another novel, and half a draft of a third, so it's not like all my time's been spent on just the one book. :)