Hello, readers. :) Today I’m going to start something new and start doing monthly posts so that hopefully I’ll get into a habit of writing regularly. So each month I’ll post sort of a round-up of what I’ve read and written over the month past and what my goals are for the coming month. And since this is late, this post will also have what I’ve already read/written over the current month, plus a cool writing tool I discovered. So without further ado, here’s the post.
January’s Reading
Reading is imperative to writing, but even if it weren’t, it would still be awesome. And January’s reading was pretty cool.
First off, I read The Midnight Thief, by Livia Blackburne, which of course started my whole Deep Worldbuild Project blog series. This book was amazingly written. You know how occasionally you’ll read a book that was so good you can’t find any more reading for the next month because it was so amazing and nothing else is “good enough”? This was one of those. I highly recommend it.
I also finished The Silmarillion, by Tolkien. I started this one back in March-ish of last year, and I finally finished it in late January. It’s a really interesting book, just slow to get through. :P
And this month I reread The Door Within, by Wayne Thomas Batson, who is probably my favorite author. He’s awesome. You should check out his books. They’re amazing. I’ve now reread The Door Within three times.
I started a couple other books, too, that I sent back to the library after just a couple chapters. Usually I try to finish books I start, even if they’re bad, but… I don’t have a lot of grace left over for this particular author. I started Eye of Minds by James Dashner. It could have been good, maybe, if I hadn’t already read the entire Maze Runner series and gotten rather irritated at him and his writing errors (you can read my review post here), but as it was I wasn’t real excited about a book with the same type of “good” organization controlling the MC. No thanks.
On the other hand, I also read The Fever Code in January, and despite making me want to punch the “good” organization in the face the entire time, the book was fairly enjoyable. I like Newt even more now.
January’s Writing
I actually wrote quite a bit in January, and mostly on a story that I’m currently calling Rebellion Ever After. (It would still be called “fairytale retelling” if not for my friend Val, so thanks to her.)
In addition to that, I also wrote some on a rewrite of an oooooooold story of mine called The Half-Elves, which is rather bittersweet. On the one hand, the writing is significantly better because I started this thing seven and a half years ago and finished the first draft three and a half years ago, so my writing is a lot better now. On the other hand, it’s developing better now as well, which means that a couple of important pieces in the original might not even happen in the rewrite.
Other than that I did a little bit of writing in several other WIPs, as well as blogging more (yay!), but overall January wasn’t particularly productive.
February’s Writing
February has only been here for four days and it has already been more productive (or it felt more productive, at least) than January. Most of that, I believe, is thanks to myWriteClub, which I discovered a few days ago thanks to one of my favorite blogs, which was formerly known as She’s Novel and is now called Well-Storied. myWriteClub is a goal-setting site made specifically for writers. You can set goals by number of words, chapters, pages, etc., and you can set up a jillion of them at once. I currently have eight of them up, with all but three of them being novels.
So this month I’ve worked on both Rebellion Ever After and The Half-Elves some more, as well as working on other projects of mine like The Masked Captain, The Lowlines, and the second draft of House of Mages (tedious, but hopefully worth it).
February’s Goals
I am known for setting myself more goals than I can realistically hit, but if you aim for the sun you may get to the moon, even if you don’t get to the sun, and you wouldn’t have even gotten that far if you’d only aimed for the other side of the world. That’s not an amazing analogy, but oh well. Hopefully it got the point across, at least.
So, my goals for this month are mostly writing related. I want to hit the halfway point, at least, with all of my projects by the end of February. My deadline for all of them is the end of March, and I think this is totally doable. Especially since one of my New Year’s goals was to write two thousand words each day. If I write one thousand on each of even just two projects each day, I’m well on my way. Not that I expect to actually be able to stick to that super well. But one can hope, right?
I’d also like to finish the books I’m reading: Spindle by Shonna Slayton, The Rise of the Wyrm Lord by Wayne Thomas Batson, and Virals by Kathy Reichs. I’m reading a couple other books, too, but I know I can’t realistically expect to finish them all by the end of February.
I’d also like to write at least one blog post per week, if not more often. Starting, of course, with today’s posts. I’m thinking of doing a short post about one of my WIPs each of the next eight days (today included), but I don’t know if y’all would be interested in those. So comment below and let me know if you’re interested in that. Each post would have a synopsis (and probably a not-so-great one since I’ve never been amazing at synopses), and a short description of each of the main characters, what the current word count is, what I find most interesting about it, I don’t know. Just random fun facts, maybe some excerpts. I’m not entirely sure yet what those posts would entail. So maybe let me know what interests you in a post like that. I want you guys to enjoy these, I don’t want to just blog because it’s a thing writers do, or something. So let me know what you like to read on a blog and what you like to read about and stuff and I’ll try to write interesting posts. :)