E________, first draft: 27,700 words.
I don’t do new year’s resolutions. As ever, an aversion to hard work lies at the root of this particular failure. List making! Public declarations! Execution! It’s all far too exhausting.
Plus, I can also rationalize my idleness by pointing out there’s a lot of evidence that resolutions don’t actually work. I suspect that if you’re the sort of person for whom resolutions make sense, you’ re also the sort of person who doesn’t actually need them. You would have done whatever it is you resolved to do anyway. And if you are going to do it, why wait to start in the new year? For sure, if I was going to resolve to go to the gym and get fit, I would start that in, say, March, when all those crispy new January resolutions have faded and wrinkled in the dreich days of late winter. There’d be less crowding in the changing rooms and shorter lines at the equipment.
But that’s not to say the long dark nights aren’t a good time for dreaming and reflection. When better? Particularly now that the rush of Christmas is over and the only thing to sustain us through the two coldest months of the year is the thought of what might lie beyond. Unless, of course, you’re a snow sports person. In which case the time for action is now!
Snow sports? Nein danke. As someone who only leaves the house at this time of year because of work or the relentless demands of the dog, dreams and reflections for 2022 are all I have. In my writing life, Braking Day is due out on April 5th, The Wrong Shape to Fly, my contribution to Baen’s Worlds Long Lost anthology will hopefully be published in the fall, and TSW, the novel formerly known as V______ R___, will be going out to market looking for a publisher in the next few weeks. My dream for 2022 is that Braking Day is a great success, The Wrong Shape to Fly leads to opportunities to write more short stories, and that someone agrees to take on TSW. Fingers crossed that the dream comes true!
But then, being the sort of person that I am, I cannot help but reflect on what will happen if the dream does come true. On top of my (not undemanding) day job, I will be committed to writing a SF follow up to Braking Day, a short story or two, editing TSW, and committing to a follow up to that. Dream realization means two novels a year, plus short stories, plus all the marketing and ancillary stuff that goes along with.
Not so long ago, I was whining about how I couldn’t do NaNoWriMo because it was too much work. Plodding along at 600 words a day over maybe a couple of hours was enough to get out a novel a year, I reckoned. The 2,000 daily words required for NaNoWriMo was, in my opinion, nothing less than a recipe for burn out and divorce.
And yet here I am, dreaming of an outcome that will more than double my present workload. Four hours a day, plus my actual, you know, job. Am I nuts?
Probably. But you know what? I don’t care. If a dream coming true leads to problems, those are the sorts of problems everyone should have.
Bring it on.