Ponderings (how many of these can you have!?)

Not much new on the home front. Been busy with freelance projects and looking ahead to how the rest of the year is going to play out. Mostly I'm keen on getting one of our credit cards paid off by the end of May, after which my only concern is novel work and short story work.

I started doing freelancing as part of my resume-building process on the way to landing an agent for my first novel, when it's completed. It's hard enough to get a literary agent to read your work if you are a short story writer, and nearly impossible these days if you are a nobody without anything to your credit. When I decided to start doing this for a living I set a few goals for myself, the most important being "have 18-24 months of freelancing and/or short story sales" prior to searching for an agent.

To-date, I'm coming up on the 14 month mark as a successful freelance writer. In the meantime I've published one short story professionally, and I've got 5 in circulation right now looking for a home. However, somewhere along the way I got sidetracked with the money, and my novel work got left to the side. The last time I worked on it was about 6 weeks ago, although I did write a short story about a month ago over a two day period when I was in between freelance projects.

First it was needing new computers after settling in. Then we needed a new digital camera. Then we wanted an elliptical/cross trainer for the house. Then I started looking at the fact that I was making 1k a month doing this part time and I said hmmmm, why not pay off our 4.5k worth of credit card debt and be 100% debt free?

We are lucky in that neither one of us has to work full time. The apartment is paid for, she works 15 hours a week, I work about the same, and her money pays our living expenses and entertainment. She's a full time student, and I'm writing for a living. If I wanted to pursue this full-time I could make a very healthy living at it, especially considering every penny I make goes straight into the bank account, not towards bills. It still gets spent on household and fluff shit, but that's what money's for, right? Savings are great, but you also need things or there's no point to having worked for the cash in the first place :)

Had a great hour long talk with Evy last night on our way back from the park about outline details for the rest of this book and the next several. I've got 11 chapters written so far, plus a prologue, and I'm sitting at around 70k words. I'm shooting for 30 chapters for the first novel, so it will be around 200k words when it's done, give or take. Plans for 5 in this series, so far. However, I started looking at the plotline for book one and realized I had a seriously unrealistic hole in the plot I hadn't seen before, so we discussed ways to re-write a couple of chapter portions in order to tie it up realistically and move back to the original plan. Sometimes two heads are better than one, ya know?

I've also already outlined two sci-fi novels and I'm starting to have the initial plans for another fantasy series after this first one gets done. One thing I'm not doing with the first series is trying to write an "epic" high fantasy series. I'm shooting for high fantasy, but not necessarily epic. I don't want to try for a Robert Jordan-esque series on my first try because let's face it, I'm not a seasoned author. I want to take a less aggressive approach and hone my craft via short stories and a few lesser novels before I attempt my "great work", if you catch my drift. Still, things are starting to come together and if it all pans out, I'll be spending 2010-2015 working on my first fantasy series, then 2015-2020 working on a couple of sci-fi novels and sundries, with a more detailed fantasy work coming in 2020 after I've had 10 years or so to work at being an author. I've still got a lot to learn in terms of plot development, character development, and the overall writing process.

But then again, who knows? Maybe my first series will evolve, sell thousands of copies, and become such a cash cow that I do like Terry Brooks or Raymond Feist and milk the series for every last drop I can get out of it.