Another Dip in the Editing Pool

In November, a group of us spent a lot of time writing together, which does tend to happen during NaNoWriMo.  It's so much easier to get the writing done if you have other people doing the same thing as you.

Anyway, we were talking about it, and we couldn't help but wonder why we, as writers, are so willing to work together and have a similar goal during November, but not the rest of the year.  Why do we let ourselves become less productive just because it isn't time for NaNo?

It didn't take us long to decide that we needed to come up with another month that was much sooner than April's Camp Nano session where we could all work together, and decided to have a February challenge for writing.

Why February, you ask?  Simple.  That was when I thought I would have something ready to write.  Yep.  That was the entire reason.  Turns out, I could have had something ready for January.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have something ready, but it's all good, I can just start planning another novel.

Here's the agreement:  During the month of February, we would have a writing challenge.  We all pick a writing goal (mine is 100k words, which should get me the second novel in my Jayne Pheare series written).

I'm quite excited for this.  It will be a month that isn't Nano where I might actually be productive (which was one of my goals for the year).  There won't be any websites to track our progress, but we will all be accountable to each other, and try to keep everyone on track for the month.

But wait, you say, what does all of this have to do with editing?  Now, that's where the story gets interesting.

You see, we were discussing this idea of ours to have a writing challenge and another girl said she would love to do it, but why not do an editing challenge in January too?


I, for one, was more than happy with this idea.  I have a ton of editing to get done, and having other people working at the same time for some reason always seems to help.  So I agreed immediately, and after a few other yeses, we had ourselves an editing challenge.

Of course, I finished the novel I was editing, and it's currently with beta readers, but I'm going to be editing Stolen Magick, a YA about a young girl who discovers that she has the ability to wield magick.  I had a lot of fun writing it, because a lot of stuff happened that wasn't originally planned.  Characters, plot points, love interests and entire chapters were added in, and I can't wait to see how it turned out.

So on January first, I will be diving head first in to the pool of editing another novel (which means that I have to actually pay attention to a world than the one I've been living in for the last little while).  It's going to be interesting.

2013 is going to be a great year, and it's going to start with some editing.  (nope, I never thought I would ever say those words either).

Are you going to get some editing done in January?  What's your favourite part of the writing process?

Teaming Up

My multiple projects have been the subject of a couple of my posts now, and it seems that this one is going to be no different.  Probably because I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by how much work I've managed to create for myself.  The fact that I actually want to add more projects to that list is really not the point.  The point is that despite how much I have on the go, I have yet to get anything completed.

I'm not the only one with this problem.  A friend of mine on twitter recently commented on a post a made.  It was a random one about having to finish my critiques before going away for the weekend.  She asked if I could look over some of her work, and I happily agreed (because I'm not nearly busy enough, I need to add a couple of more things to my schedule).  She told me that she wasn't close enough to being finished right at that moment, but she would be eventually.

The conversation went on in that direction for a while until she said something about another twitter friend telling her she needed to actually finish a project.  Pick one thing and actually focus on it.  It was so close to my own situation where I just keep project hopping, and never really settling in to get one done, that I couldn't help but tell her I had the same problem.

Of course, us being the writers we are, this realization that we had the same problem when it came to our writing quickly escalated into us have Wonder Twin-Multitaskers Powers.  Don't ask, it was late.

Anyway, while this may seem like nothing more than a random conversation, it was a lot more than that because of what came out of it: accountability.

I don't exactly have a great track record when it comes to being accountable to myself.  I tend to let myself off the hook more often than not, and that leads to things like entire weekends being spent getting caught up on TV shows as opposed to writing the book I was already 40,000 words behind on (no...that book is still not finished.  I no longer have and ETA on that, but I'm hoping eventually, as I have some serious plans for that series.)

Anyway, the point is, it was obviously not working.  Finishing a project isn't the same as doing something like nano.  There I have a chart I have to update daily, I have a word count goal that pretty much everyone in the city whose doing nano knows about.  I have other people working toward that same goal (Yeah, okay, maybe not exactly the same...theirs might be just a bit lower than mine...) that I can compete with to keep myself going.  Right now, though?  Right now I have nothing to keep that motivation.  And if I'm slacking on keeping myself accountable, nothing is ever going to get done.

That's where Moni comes in.  Since she's been having the same problems as me, we've decided to team up.  Create a system where we will be accountable to each other, and with any luck that will be what we need to get our projects moving forward again.

Of course, we haven't started yet.  With travelling over the weekend and critique group, not to mention the fact that we're in different time zones, we've decided to try and get started on Tuesday.  I'm hopeful that this will work.  There's nothing more encouraging than knowing there's another writer out there working on their projects at the same time as you and struggling just as much with the same issues.

Come Tuesday we'll see if we can actually get our projects done.  (I will be working on The Commons and getting it ready to be sent out, even though Pandora isn't done being written yet.  I would love to spend all of my time in Jayne's world, but it's really not fair to characters and plots I've already started.  Only once The Commons is out to beta readers will I allow myself to be pulled back into Pandora. Sorry Jayne.)

I will, however, be doing Camp Nano in June this year.  I don't know yet if I will just be writing the end of Pandora or if I will be writing something new.  I need to see how quickly I can get through my editing.  Either way, though, I'm glad that I found another writer than can hopefully help me through the multitasking cycle of starting a new project without finishing the last.