A NEW BEGINNING

New Year is a great time to restart and reboot.  So first off, sorry for being away for so long.  It started with me missing a week, then another, then another.  So I finally decided that instead of trying to catch up, I’d just wait to January and start again.

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions.  Tried it a couple of times, never really was inspired to stick to them.  Once, a friend of mine suggested making a list of 100 things you want to do in the next year.  Some of these goals can be big, but a lot of them have to be small, like “make dentist appointment”.  This is because with 100 things, you’d have to complete one every three-and-a-half days on average.  But this does give you a lot of opportunities for small victories ,which can be encouraging.

I prefer a list of goals.  My tag line is “Follow me on my journey from wanna be writer to has-been hack in a single life time”, but it occurred to me that I haven’t been giving you a lot to follow.  So here is a list of things to follow in 2015:

1)       Submit entire Steampunk script for review.  In my GLAWS critique group, we generally read fifteen pages of two peoples’ scripts in a meeting and critique them.  This has been very helpful to me.  Just from fifteen pages I have gotten a lot of helpful advice on my writing and how to trim it.  But there are action scenes the group has never seen.  And now I would like to get some comments on the script as a whole.  I was recently reminded that one can also submit a script as a whole for review.  It won’t be read out loud, instead, the time will be spent critiquing the whole project.

2)      Attend GLAWS’ Big Story Writer’s Conference.  This is a chance to hear from working writers, agents and editors.  I went last year and it was very helpful.  Many of my posts were derived from those lectures.

3)      Rewrites based on the above critiques.  Once I get feedback, it’s time for another rewrite.  And then…

4)      Submit Steampunk script to agents.  As GLAWS writer Art Holcome says, all your writing doesn’t mean anything unless you get it out there.  And my end goal is to be able to make a living doing this.  I want someone to pay me to play make believe with my imaginary friends all day.  I have three lists of agents to submit to.  I’ll just go down the line until someone wants to represent me.

5)      Finish rewrites on Christmas script.  With the holiday season, I pulled out my Christmas script again.  I made some changes I really like, but I’m still not completely happy with it.  I feel like I’m ALMOST there!  This will be the next script I start submitting to my GLAWS critique group in fifteen page segments.

6)      Novelize Steampunk script.  Since a script is essentially a 143 page outline, I think I should be able to complete a first draft in six or seven months.  It would be sooner, but a novel is much more detailed than a script.  So I expect to spend a good amount of time doing research on the Victorian era.

7)      Join a GLAWS Science Fiction Critique group.  Once the novel is written, it will be time to get feedback on it.  Fortunately, GLAWS has separate critique groups for every genre from poetry and young adult to horror and screen writing.

8)      Volunteer at GLAWS events.  To be a writer today you need to do more than write.  You need to get feedback, promote your work, get an agent and network.  Networking is my weak spot.  So to work on this, I am going to volunteer at events such as the monthly GLAWS Speaker Events.

9)      Novelize Christmas script.  Don’t know if I’ll actually have time for this.  But it’s contemporary, a lot less research.

I’ll post updates as I work on these goals.  And I could use some encouragement from all you out there.  For more information on GLAWS, the Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Society, go to http://www.glaws.org/

What are your writing plans for the year?

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