Heir To Magic

It seems like every time I get a few minutes to work on my novel, I fall asleep.  Last night a friend of mine was talking about how she was going to work on her novel in a notebook for a few minutes before she went to bed, and I actually felt envious of her.  I still had half an hour of work to get done on other things and was already drifting off to sleep.  Oh how I would love to get some work done on my novel.

I’m just going to have to take back my writing time.  I mean, sheeesh! I wrote an entire 80,000+ word novel in under 30 days once, surely I can find the time to write 300 words on my novel each week throughout this year, right?

And here I am supposed to write the first chapter of another novel to boot - I ain’t even had a chance to outline that novel.

So, I am going to see what I can do about reorganizing my work and reclaiming a hour each night in which I work on Heir to  Magic.  We’ll see how that works out, I might not get an hour every night, but I might get one hour a week.

Okay, New Years is just around the corner, so it is time to make resolutions.  Am I the only one that is flinching?  Every year resolutions are made, and every year resolutions are broken.  The year starts out with such grand plans for what we want to achieve and then one thing or another happens that we just don’t get it done or we fall off the diet or we forget that we had promised ourselves we would do this or that… Then we hit the end of the year and look back and wonder why we even bothered to make the resolutions.

And yet we do it again.  We look ahead and tell ourselves, “This year will be different.  This year I will make more time to ______.”  We have such high hopes that I think we often set the bar to that same height, a height we can not realistically achieve.  So, this year, my resolutions are going to be small.  I’ll make a resolution that I can achieve and when I reach that goal I will renew it with a new goal.  Rather than resolving to write a full novel I resolve to write a single chapter this year.

Can I write a single chapter?  Yes.  I have no doubt that I can write a single chapter well before the end of January if I can find the time to work on it.  And yet that is the stickler, finding the time to work on the novel.  I will only write a chapter.  Then if I fail, I have not failed that much.  I only failed to write a single chapter, not a whole novel.  And yet, if I write that chapter I can renew my resolution and write another chapter, then another.  I may come out the end of the year with a novel, I may only have one chapter… and I may have failed to meet my resolution, but I think this year I will reach my New Year’s resolution and even surpass it.

So, in 2008, I resolve to write a single chapter of a novel.

I have a composition notebook that I have started making random notes in about my novel.  Sort of a brainstorming notebook to let me work out a plan for what to do with one scene or another and where I can collect random bits of scenes that I have thought up but not yet flushed out into a full scene.

I can do my best work when I am writing longhand, so the notebook is a perfect brainstorming tool. I just start working on something that seems like it might work in the novel, then slowly it gets fleshed out into a scene that I can later type up into the computer.  It was how, years ago, I wrote the first few chapters of the novel.  Somewhere along the way I stopped using a notebook for sketching our the scenes into a rough draft, but I think it’s time to get back to doing the broad strokes stages of outlining in a notebook once again and see if that helps me to finish the novel.