December Updates & New Year Intentions

Original photo by Airam Dato-on on Unsplash

Hello hello and happy December! It's nearly the end of 2023 and I have some updates for you from the writing front!

First off, Tinyletter is closing as of February 2024, so I will be moving my newsletter...elsewhere. I haven't figured out where yet, but if you have recommendations, do drop them below! (Not Substack).

Secondly, and more excitingly--I finished drafting Legends of Mourra, Vol. 1! My goal for the past several years has finally been achieved! All thinks to a little something called zero drafting, introduced to me by a writer I follow over on tumblr called @bebewrites. Here's what she had to say on how she zero drafts:

Inspired by this method, and desperate to finally have a draft of LofM on paper as completely as possible, I tried zero drafting. And I kid you not, within two days, everything about it that had been floating in my head since I was fifteen years old got written out. In bullet point form, yes, but! I figured out plot gaps and emotional moments and character beats and areas of weakness that need to be strengthened! More importantly, I now have something to work with. Improving something that exists outside of my own brain is going to be so much easier than trying to get it out of my brain all pretty and/or cohesively!

I am so wildly excited about it; this is huge for me. Though I thought I had been trying to write a crappy draft, I now realize that I fell into the trap of trying to write it pretty and not just writing it to exist. But I don't have to worry about that anymore; it exists! In its rawest form, but it exists! Which means I'm get to take a break from it so it can sit and percolate and I can come back to it with fresh eyes and maybe an alpha reader.

So what's next?

Well, I want to finally redraft Rivener and expand it into everything I wanted it to be. This will be (theoretically) easy, as I have a fairly polished draft to work with. However, just so I don't lose sight of my goals for it, I'm going to be zero drafting the revamp first, and then rewriting it. All that to say, I hope to have Rivener 2.0 completed by the end of 2024!

Speaking of which...

My 2024 Intentions

The idea of setting New Year goals stresses me out and feels like a setup for a failure. So I am once again making intentions, which are rewarding even if they're never fulfilled. And my writerly intentions are as follows:

• aim to write and share a prompt fill every other sunday (but at least once a month)
• submit to something on submittable at least 3x this year
• compile last year’s fictober shorts into a collection to share and post
• edit PCR according to suggestions from beta reader
• send at least 3 query letters for PCR
• finish 0 drafting Rivener 2.0
  
• finish rewriting Rivener 2.0 before the end of 2024
• do fictober this year
• find an alpha reader for LofM’s 0 draft
• make a choose-your-own-adventure story via tumblr polls
• write book response for every book i read

I have one more post for 2023 (a little prompt fill) and then that's it for this year!

Until 2024, happy reading and writing!