A Change of Plans

Last time, I wrote about my plan to write every day using writing prompts.  As you may have guessed from my title, my plans changed on that front.  The good news is that I wrote almost every day from December 5th until today, the 20th.  There were maybe 2 or 3 days where I didn’t write, and most of those happened this last week (yesterday and the day before).  But prior to that, I was finishing a rather large writing commitment and didn’t have time for writing prompts.

Now that my writing time is freed up somewhat, I’m back to deciding what to do next.  I read in an article from Script Magazine that you should write a single line a day to keep yourself in the writing habit (it’s number 7 in the list), and I’m liking that idea a bit more than the writing prompts right now; it’s an easy way to keep writing even when I feel like I don’t have the energy for it (like during those few days off I took this last week).  And who knows?  Maybe once I write the one line I’ll want to keep going.  So for now I’m going to give that a try, then reevaluate in a week or so.  I’ve also just dug up an older writing project that I wanted to start about a year ago, so I might be working on that over Christmas, too.

NaNoWriMo is Over…Now What?

NaNoWriMo finished about four days ago.  And now that it’s over, I’m really starting to feel its absence.  Sure, the mad-dash, month-long creativity is hard to sustain long term.  But after writing “The End,” I sort of feel at a loss for what I should work on next.

Sure, I could keep working on the story I wrote for NaNoWriMo.  As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, I already have ideas for revisions.  But I’d prefer to take a bit of time, put a bit of space between me and the novel before I start tackling revisions.  If I don’t want to work on that right now, I could work on one of my other story ideas, or maybe start trying to untangle last year’s NaNoWriMo story.  But pretty much all of those are stuck in various stages of world building right now, and I’ve been content to let them sit, letting my mind work away at them here and there.  That’s not going to work long-term, but it’s working for now as I focus on some more immediate projects, not all of which are writing-related.

Besides novel ideas, I’ve also been wanting to work with RPG Maker.  As I mentioned in that post, I had an idea for a game and I had every intention of working on it; unfortunately life got rather busy last month and I was unable to.  Much like the novel revisions, I have every intention of tackling this project in the near future, but an RPG also needs to be put on hold for more immediate concerns.

The problem with all of these projects is that they are a little too large in scale.  Right now I need something much smaller.  I’ve wanted to write shorter stories over the last year, but the vast majority of my ideas have been too big for that.  So instead, I’m going to try to write a small something every day based off one of the many writing prompts I have in books and find online.  My plan is to get through with different writing prompts until January 1st, at which time I will try following along with A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves.  Like NaNoWriMo, I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t write every single day; but I want to continue a relatively consistent writing habit into the new year, which is something I failed to do after last year’s NaNoWriMo success.

I’ll let you know how my progress goes!  🙂