Another One Down

Hello friends, lovers, and colleagues, this update will be swift and stupid. A few days ago (I’ve already lost count how many) I finished a writing project I’ve been alluding to for the past two fiscal quarters or so, leaving me with the task of returning to my first novel and getting that piece of work into something resembling publishable shape.

I’ve blogged about this before, but a brief rundown: after financial problems and the necessity of improving my own quality of life caused me to delay the date I picked for self-publishing my first novel, I ended up taking a few months to step away, improve my writing, and bolster my proverbial self-publishing warchest. After helping some friends with a podcasting project and consuming several books on the craft of writing, storytelling and story structure, I told myself I would write a screenplay and a novel back-to-back before recommitting myself to any form of publication. My reasoning being that that amount of time, study, word count, and saved paychecks would put me in a better place to finally publish my first novel, the original first draft of which was completed some three years ago.

And here we are, back to Codetta at last and again. My plan of attack is to take it slow - read the damn thing through once again, re-outline it based on my own reading and see what tweaks need to be made to the overal structure. That’s step one. And indeed, I will be taking that part slow as I have a few major life things coming up this Spring that should also improve my overall quality of life, and thus my writing and potential for a career. Basically I gotta move into a bigger place and buy a new car - boring stuff, but long overdue and stressful for an old goblin homebody like me.

So back to that novel I just finished… I have no idea how I feel about it. The story didn’t arise from any personal passion or message I wanted to say, rather I just felt the need to compose a solid novel. This alone was my goal.

Thus far, I’ve let one person read it: my significant other, and she finished it in a day. I’m unsure how to feel about that! She is fantastic and loves everything I write, so it’s hard to know how much I should weight her lofty praise. Regardless, the novel is such a departure from Codetta, in terms of genre, intended audience, and themes, that if I were to ever do anything with it, it would almost certainly be under a pen name.

Maybe I’ll let a couple other people read it… But that said, all I want to do right now is try and relax, detangle the knots in my brain and look forward to the much needed, albeit brief vacation I have coming up in April.

That’s all for now! Hope you’ve been having good luck with your own projects in life, whatever they may be, and getting some rejuvenation from these early Spring days. I can happily say now that I’m fully ready to put the Winter behind me and embrace the next chapter.