Thursday, January 7, 2021

Scheduling the New Year

Posted by: Nicole Luiken

 

The last two years I started January 1st with a brand-new shiny project. This year I’m only a third of the way through revisions of my current WiP (By Glamour Deceived, a paranormal romance, in case you’re curious). Nor am I under deadline. However, the power of the New Year hype/hope is such that I feel a certain pressure to draw up a writing schedule complete with spreadsheets and bar graphs. Or at least make some loose plans? Goals?

Yeah, let’s go with goals.

I’d like to be done my current revisions by April. Maybe if I find some ambition I’ll even make up a pretty pie chart of chapters to colour in my bullet journal. Or a spreadsheet. Maybe.

Then I’ll probably turn my eyes back to Replacing the Princess, a YA fantasy series that’s been my main project for the last two years. Book one is fairly polished, but, as I wrote the first draft of book two this fall, I became aware of a number of tweaks needed. That should hopefully only take a few weeks. Still, let’s be generous and say that takes care of May.

After that, my plans get much vaguer. I could do a second draft of Replacing the Princess, book two. More likely, by then I will be sick of revising and want to do some drafting. The problem is, I get new ideas with a much greater frequency than I have the time to write them. Today, if I had to pick the next “idea” to write it would either be Ghost Cinderella or Little House in the Jurassic, both of which I have an extensive set of notes for. But six months from now, it may very well be that a new idea has come knocking at my door, or I’ll decide to write Mage in a Coma, book three in my planned paranormal romance series. First drafts usually take me about two to three months, so that’s June to August taken care of.

That still leaves four months of the year unscheduled.

Hmmm. Perhaps by then I’ll be ready to revise the second Replacing the Princess book. The process usually takes about six months. So that means 2022 will likely begin mid-project, too. Oh, well.

Most likely of all, my schedule will go hopelessly awry sometime after April. Just like today's to do list went awry when I suddenly remembered I had a blog due tomorrow...

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