September- 2020 Goals Update
Hi everyone!
Gosh, this year is flying by. I hope everyone and their families are safe with everything that’s been happening with the virus and the lockdown.
I apologise that it has been such a long time since my last blog, but I thought it would be a good time to update you.
Back in January, I set 4 goals for 2020:
– Finish first round of edits for my third historical fiction novel
– Finish 1st draft of my new mystery thriller
– Participate in Camp NaNoWriMo and NaNoWriMo
-Outline a potential 4th historical fiction novel.
If you read my last blog post in May, then you’ll know that by then I had finished my first round of edits, or ‘content’ edits, in my third historical fiction novel. I also won Camp NanoWriMo with my mystery thriller short novel – if you’ve no idea what Camp Nano is, I explain more detail and talk about my project in my last blog post. So, by the end of May, I had already met my first two goals! 🙂
My plan for May and June was for me to start the 2nd round of editing – focusing on tightening up the narrative, checking on structure and beginning to check for issues around grammar and spelling.
To be honest, though, I didn’t make lots of progress with this goal. I think lockdown made me lose motivation for a while and I felt a bit ‘stuck’ with it. I’ve since realised I think it’s because I don’t really like the pacing at the beginning – in fact at the moment I’m considering rewriting some of the beginning!
I should say that during this time, I did do some final proofreading of Lottie’s Locket (the children’s fantasy novel currently in process of publication) which involved going through the changes my publishers had suggested (mostly catching typos!) to the novel. More recently it had one final check through my mother, who is an excellent proofreader, but the final manuscript is now finalised. I’m on the verge of approving the final front cover design, so I’m excited to share that with you soon.
In July, Camp NaNoWriMo came along again and I was excited to dive into another new project. This time I decided to write a historical fantasy featuring none other than pirates, which was really quite fun! The basic plot was that my main character, Marcus, is a sailor who ends up being saved by pirates. They crash land on an island and have to work together for survival.
Marcus feels loyalty to them, but also rejects their piracy. Then he meets the people who live on the island…
A lot of the novel is of Marcus’ own thoughts as he tries to pick apart what the right course of action should be. There are a couple of sections I need to expand and I still need to write the ending, but I hit my goal of 20,000 words and enjoyed the project.
That takes us to August! I had the liberating thought with my 3rd historical fiction novel that, because I’m still not sure about the beginning of my novel, I could start editing somewhere else (I felt like the student who gets stuck on the first question of an exam, then remembers they can skip that question and go back to the beginning later).
I knew the last two weeks of August my husband and I would be off on a ‘staycation’, so I decided on a goal of editing 20 pages during my office hours. It was really helpful to see progress (I was able to use the NaNoWriMo site to track pages I’d edited) and I actually edited 22 pages!
Today is the first day after our break and I have set myself the goal of 90 pages edited in 6 weeks, so we will see how I do! I made a good start with 3 pages done this morning, so only 87 to go.
So, for my 2020 goals, that leaves doing November NaNoWriMo and the only one I haven’t thought much about – outlining a potential 4th historical fiction novel. Maybe I’ll start thinking about that in the next few weeks!
Till next time, (hoping to blog much more regularly from now on – she says!)
Maria 🙂