Wednesday, January 10, 2007

A Canadian Werewolf on the Back Burner

I'm so proud of myself. It's not that I made a New Year's resolution or anything, but I have remained relatively committed to my writing time recently. The past three mornings I've set my alarm for 5:00 AM to allow myself an hour to work on writing before I start getting ready for work.

But I haven't been actually writing. I've been doing things that support my writing, such as market research and packaging off submissions to different markets. Much of 2006 was consumed with writing my online serial thriller "I, Death", working on North of Infinity II (final editing bits), selecting material for North of Infinity III, trying to plug away at my novel in progress A Canadian Werewolf in New York, and focusing on the submission of my novel Morning Son.

Which left very little time to work on my short fiction. Sure, I did some short story work in bits and pieces, and did send a few items off as submissions. But my short work was mostly neglected in 2006, so I wanted to start 2007 off on the right foot.

So far, in the past three days I've been able to send three short stories off to new markets. I think I'll be comfortable once I've got at least half a dozen stories in circulation. But the most interesting thing is that since I've been spending time these past few days focusing on submitting stories and market research, I've had ACWWINY brewing on that back burner and several ideas thoughts about the story and some of the characters have been gestating. I'm building a bit of internal momentum on that while working on other writing pieces, which I absolutely love. It means, when I actually sit down to write ACWWINY I'll have already done a lot of homework on it without realizing it.

5 comments:

Franny said...

Research is very important when writing. I am very lucky to work in a library with access to so many online databases, the knowledge is just BEGGING to be dug up.
For the past few months I've been laying the groundwork for something too. What becomes of it, I don't know - its still early in the gestation to talk about it. But as they say, a posse ad esse.

lime said...

ok.....you get up HOW early to deovte time to being creative ????? at that hour i'm lucky to be creative enough to figure out how not to drool on myself.

Anonymous said...

Good for you Mark.

I've been languishing a bit, stagnating really. I just can't seem to get things moving even though I know where they want to go!

So if you have any extra mojo...maybe shuttle some my way!!! Except the 5am mojo...I agree with Lime on that one!

Rainypete said...

I do most of my more creative things either extremely early in the morning or extremely late at night (although I guess the two of them are perilously close together). What I need isn't creativity but rather focus. A means to bring it all together into something bigger. Unfortunately no part of the clock seems to help with that one.

BTExpress said...

You are a busy little author. LOL Good luck getting your stuff published.