It’s been a crazy few days with the holidays, and I’m finally getting back to my close out plan. I had intended to be back to writing right after Christmas, but my brother’s fiancée asked me to be a bridesmaid in their wedding and we spent the day after Christmas shopping for bridesmaid dresses. What a place to people watch! It was a hoot. I might have to spend more time there just to get some good story ideas :D

The good news is before Christmas I finished up the first draft of Dirty Work. It definitely needs some revising, but I have a good start. It will definitely be towards the top of my list to complete in the beginning of 2013.

I’ve started making progress on my revisions of Reunion Makes Three. It’s not nearly as much work as I thought it was going to be. When I pulled up the document it was 1500 words closer to my goal than I thought I was. I’ve added almost one thousand since then, and I’m only a third of the way through. I should have no problem adding the words needed to submit this work.

I’m not sure if I will be able to get to some of my other goals, like the graphics I wanted to create and the work I wanted to do on my end of the world ménage. But If I think a submitted work and a completed first draft is still a pretty good accomplishment for two weeks.

I'm over at Adriana Kraft's blog talking about how I use the holidays to enhance my descriptions. Also find out my 12 favorite Christmas

http://adrianakraft.com/guest-bloggers/guest-willa-edwards/

Today is the official start of my fulltime writer days. Every year, during the holiday break when I’m on vacation from my evil day job, I take the opportunity to try out being a fulltime writer. To me, these days are my trial run, my time to experiment with being a fulltime writer, so that when I finally take the plunge, I’ll be prepared.

Last year, when I played fulltime writer, I learned a few things that I’ll be adapting for this year. Last year, I tried to focus on one project at a time, which mean, I ended up spending seven straight hours doing revision. As some of you might know from my many blog posts bemoaning revisions, it’s one of my least favorite aspects of writing. To me they’re like going to the
dentist, necessary, and my works much better after their done, but torture
during (torture is a little extreme but you get the point).

By forcing myself to work so hard on my edits, I burnt myself out some, and didn’t end up getting as much done as I would have liked. This year I don’t have edits, but I do want to do my revisions for Reunion Makes Three, so I’m going to split the difference. This year I’m going to try and devote half my time (most likely my morning time) to writing the two works currently on the docket, Dirty Work and A Ménage for the End of the World, and spend half my time revising Reunion Make Three. I’m hoping this way I won’t burn myself out the same way I did last year and I’ll be able to get all the projects done before January 1st.

The other thing I did wrong last year is I tried to focus on writing for eight straight hours. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I don’t focus on the day job for eight straight hours. I get up and talk to people, when I call someone to verify a budget, I also end up talking to them for a while about their family or personal life, when I talk to my boss about what we have to do next we always end up venting a bit about the craziness going on a work. It isn’t human nature to focus so much for so long. So I’m going to try and apply that logic to my fulltime writing. 

What I plan to do is focus for short periods of time, twenty minutes working up to thirty. But during these times I have to really focus, no distractions at all. After the allotted time, I can do something a little more fun, check email, talking online, or wrap presents, for the remainder of the hour. I think by truly focusing for these periods of time I think I’ll get more done and make more progress than if I focused for longer periods but ended up taking longer breaks.

Only time will tell if these changes will improve my output, but either way, I’m looking forward to have two weeks of writing. It’s my favorite time of the year.

Last year, I was inspired by an event we have at the day job, call the December Close Out. The point of the event is to move as much product
off the shelves and out the door as possible before the end of the month,
thereby taking it off our books. 

Last year, using this inspiration, I did my best to get as much writing and promotion work done as I could. I was able to revise and submit two short stories (Snow Day and Serving Madame) which were both picked up for
publication shortly after the New Year. While also completing edits for Heart’s Ultimatum, my first release of the year, and a few promotional endeavors, including my first ever book trailer.

It definitely was a huge success. So I’ve decided to do it again!!!

This year, however, I’m in a different spot than I was last year. This year I don’t have any short stories lying around to submit, because I self-published them this year instead, but I do have plenty of partially completed novels. Just for fun, this last week I decided to count, and as of right now I have 15 works in progress, that doesn’t include all the sequels to those books I have stewing in my head, or the three series I’ve done some world building on but haven’t actually typed a word of yet. I’d really like to get a few more of these completed and off to a publisher, to make some room in my very crowded mind for some new ideas. Not to mention lower my data storage rates :D

And the timing this year is perfect. I just finished my final edits for Wandering Off the Path, which means I won’t be distracted by edits like last year, but it also means that I don’t have anything else in the pipeline after January, when Wandering goes on Preorder. 

So here’s my plan of attack. First I’m going to finish the first draft of Dirty Work. This will be the last work in my Naughty Holiday List series, which has proved to be difficult and fun to write. Right now I’m two thirds of the way through the story, and I can’t walk out on the characters now. 

After that’s complete, I’d like to revise and resubmit Reunion Makes Three. I really love this story, and the other characters in the series, and I think it will fit in well at Siren. But in order to do that I need to bump up the word count quite a bit to make it fit their guidelines, which may take some work.

If I have any other time I’d love to finish up my end of the world ménage, which I dropped after edits came through for Wandering, but I’m really looking forward to finishing. I also need to get some blogs done and set
up for Wandering’s release, and create a better banner for my facebook
page/group.

I’m hoping between reinstating writing during my lunch breaks for the remaining work days of the year, which I got out of the habit of doing due to the illness I picked up at Thanksgiving (thanks again so much baby bro!), and the two full weeks off the day job for the holidays, I’ll be able to make some real progress. During my time off I’m planning again, to play at being a fulltime writer.  I’d like to work 8 hours every day, but Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (I’ll probably work some, but with all the family stuff going on it’s hard to do eight hours). 

I’ve already started to think about what I want to do next year, writing wise, and I definitely want to work on getting more works out, closer together (especially with my series), and really getting some quality work done this month will go far with that goal. 

I hope to make this year another great success, like last year, and close out 2012 strong.