Every year, there’s always a veritable flotilla of memes around the New Year with people rolling their eyes at the “New year, new me” thing and to be honest, I get it: New Year’s resolutions are large exercises in futility, really. How many resolutions do you actually achieve? Do we not all end the year, rueing lost opportunities and wishing we had done better? (I’m betting more of us do that than we probably want to admit, myself included.)
Writing is different though. Not the whole ‘exercise in futility thing, because if you aim as high as possible, very often you end up lower than you expected, but because this is the year of focus. I feel like the past two years I’ve sort of been all over the place and while it might be okay to watch half a dozen things on multiple streaming platforms or have your nose or your ear into multiple different books, but after a while it just all blends together and becomes white noise.
This is the year I want to really hunker down and start sorting out the white noise. I’m going to trim back on my content, my reading, and more importantly, my writing as well- not because I want to write less, but because I really want to make sure I’m writing more effectively and meeting any goals that I set for the year.
So, what’s on tap for 2022? Let’s find out:
The Big Project: Book 4! It’s a romance, the working title is “When The Heart Feels Again” and I kicked a little bit of life into it during NaNoWriMo1 last year and managed to get a whopping 10,154 words out of the deal. The goal for this year is to get it into a draft form so I can start revisions with an eye for final release in (hopefully) mid-2023.
So, what’s holding me back on this one? Mainly just finding the groove of the project again. I’ve got a fairly comprehensive outline for the first act or so, but I made some decisions about another project I was hoping to get done and released this year that are going to impact how I end this story and I haven’t decided whether I’m just going to say fuck it and do it anyway or whether I need to change things around. Once I suss that out, I think I’ll be able to find the groove on this one easily enough.
The Wider Goal: I want to start getting serious about polishing up my short fiction and submitting them as widely as possible. While I’m perfectly happy to keep releasing books online as an indy author when I started this whole mess nine years ago, my goal was a simple one: always get better! There’s plenty about writing I don’t know and I know there’s plenty about releasing and marketing my books myself I don’t know, but I like to think I’ve gotten better at it as I went along. I feel like I have anyway. So, it’s time to get out there and start polishing up short fiction to see if I can get a story published anywhere.
Future Plans: I’ve got some seeds of future concepts that I want to nurture and water a bit to see what grows. In no particular order, they sort of look like this:
Untitled Sci-Fi Concept: As the galactic civil war rages, the Emperor revives a barbaric practice of kidnapping denizens of less advanced planets and reprogramming them to be his soldiers. One of them, a young woman named Tanala finds out the truth of what was done to her and vows revenge. (This is quite literally all I’ve pretty much got on this. I’ve got 8K words on this one— 5K on the original concept piece I wrote for HFY over on Reddit and then 3K for a first Chapter and a vague outline to boot. I am excited about this concept and developing it more.)
The Skies of Venus: Serial Saturday Season 2 and a couple of other short stories I have set on Venus I think can be wrapped together and made into a thing. What kind of a thing (whether it’s a novel or novella or anthology of short stories) I don’t yet know. But there’s something here and it needs more world-building to make happen.
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Tierra Del Fuego: I’ve got 15,000 words on this one. It needs revising at a minimum, but if I can get to it this year it could be a novella release. If I decide there’s more to the story, it could be another book.
Diamonds Are A Dwarf’s Best Friends: Serial Saturday Season 3 and honestly, the one I was least satisfied with. I’ve got to go back through to edit, but this one will need more world-building before it’s ready to leave the nest and fly away on its own.
The Junk Drawer: I thought this was going to be the year I finished Murder In Kinmen and got it released, but as I started doing another polish and some editing I just kept running into the inescapable feeling that I was tapdancing through a cultural minefield. It’s not that I set out to write a murder mystery/thriller/whodunit set in Taiwan, it just sort of happened- but as a big goofy white guy who’s never actually been to Taiwan, if this is ever going to get released widely- as a novella or a full-blown book, it needs more than I can give it right now. I feel pretty solid about the research I’ve done so far (which is pretty extensive for me), but it’s the dialogue I kept coming back to. While I’m pretty confident that there’s a certain universality to the language used by law enforcement around the world, I’m not confident enough to publish it. It was a realization that I didn’t know any local idioms and trying to make “they’re going to have their fingers in the pie” into “they want their fingers in the gua buo on this one” made me a. cringe a little inside and b. wonder why my characters were starting to sound like Jerry Orbach from Law and Order.
So I put it in a drawer. It’s going to take a lot more research, sensitivity reading, and cultural knowledge to make this work the way the story deserves. I’ve got some random thoughts about what I might be able to do with it- but I’m also contemplating its impact on Book 4. The ending of Murder In Kinmen was originally set to intersect with the ending of Book 4 in a very specific way, but it might not now… I’m still thinking about that part.
I’m confident that someday, these characters and this story will get told. But for now, you’ll have to be content with it in its Reddit form over on my subreddit.
This is what’s on tap for 2022 and the year ahead in writing- along with blog posts, Reddit rants, and Substack posts weekly. I hope you’ll get to see some of these projects come to life and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy and subscribe to this Substack as well. I hope everyone is having a Happy New Year and is ready to take on new challenges and embark upon whatever annual quest for futility you have planned.
I’m tnixon8309 if you’re looking for Nano Writing Buddies!