You know, it occurred to me recently that my writing has been a serious hobby for about seventeen years, now. In that time, I've managed to draft and publish a trilogy and several additional books, but most of those are unavailable to the public due to my decision to go back and revise most all of my work up til now. I never really pressured myself to say, "I'm going to have X number of books published in ten years, and Y number in fifteen", because that kind of goal-setting seems to work against my grain. But, honestly, I've not made near the amount of progress in seventeen years that I would have liked.
By now, it's no secret that I've struggled to get back in the groove with my writing since finding out I was going to become a mother. Motherhood has been a colossal shift in my life, and I've not had nearly the same amount of energy or time that I had before to devote to writing. I'd imagine it's a challenge most every new parent faces, whether it be with their creative endeavors, balancing work and home life, or some other application. So I've been working on coming to terms with the fact that my life just isn't the same anymore, and finding new methods to accomplish my goals. Kind of like forging new paths across a landscape that you used to travel frequently, then had the scenery get obliterated by some natural disaster. The route you traveled before no longer exists, and now you have new obstacles to cross and understand.
It does sound kind of bleak when I put it that way, but I don't mean it to be that way. I'm just trying to understand and make peace with how my writing energy is different now. It's still there, I can still feel the core of that energy circling within me and waiting for new channels to flow through. The biggest challenge for me now is chipping out those channels and learning how to moderate the flow of energy so that I don't burn out or give up altogether during a drought.
So, that brings me to my goals for this year. Remember those notebooks I lost last year? I finally found them (YAY!!!) I am in the process of reviewing my notes and materials in order to resume work on Taloner: Wekthusia, and one of my goals will be to complete the first draft by the end of 2020 and begin prepping it for revision and eventual publication. I'm unsure yet if that publication will happen this year or the next, but I'm pushing to get it done ASAP. I really feel like my readers have waited long enough for something new from the Legends of Destiny universe.
The next order of business: revision of Nethbane will continue throughout this year, and I'd also like to get this back into publication as soon as is humanly possible. I've been pretty lax with assigning myself weekly quotas for writing, but now it feels like I've been too lax. When I was revising Wings of Fate, I was working on it at least every other day, if not daily, and logging massive sums of work each week. I can't realistically expect that same kind of workload to get accomplished now as a mother, but you'd better believe I'm going to do everything I can to get things rolling again!
In addition to these goals, I have decided that as soon as I finish either the first draft of Taloner: Wekthusia or the revision of Nethbane, it's time to resume the revision of Path of a Hero, the second book in my trilogy. I've been thinking about it more over the past few months and slowly working through ideas on how to reshape some of the messier, muddier spots in the original manuscript. I would really like to see this book refined, finished, and back into print by the end of 2021. Sooner would be excellent, but it took me about two years to revise Wings of Fate, and Path of a Hero was a larger book to begin with. I'm hoping it won't take more than two years, maximum, to finish reworking it and cleaning it up. There's also the matter of new cover art for the revised edition, but we'll cross that bridge later.
Last year, it had been my plan to finish drafting Taloner: Wekthusia and then move on to other short projects, such as future Taloner books (there are at least three others I've got summaries written for, at present) but after much reflection, I've decided that the rest of the Taloner Chronicles will have to wait. After I've gotten most of the above-mentioned workload done, I intend to resume work on the duology, which has been patiently waiting for me to return to it.
My brain is saturated with sooo many things I'm dying to share with readers through that duology. There is just so much of Gaia and the series that I'd love to give all of you to read, in the intimate detail with which it exists in my head. There are other stories, too, such as the loosely-connected series Foreign Lands that I hope to someday draft and publish.
I'll stop all my chattering there, though. I've learned by now that my energy seems to best remain self-sustaining if I don't give away too many details of the content I'm working on at any given time. It's strange. And, I'm burning precious time by writing this blog entry. I really need to grit my teeth, dig my heels in, and get to work.
Until next time. And as always, thank you for reading <3 p="">
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