{"id":2322,"date":"2014-01-08T23:21:08","date_gmt":"2014-01-08T13:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2322"},"modified":"2014-05-29T22:02:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T12:02:36","slug":"writing-a-2013-recap-and-2014-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2322","title":{"rendered":"Writing &#8211; a 2013 recap and 2014 plan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\" \/>\n<p id=\"top\" \/>My 2013 writing year was a hit and miss affair. I had two flash fiction pieces published at <a title=\"Antipodean SF website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.antisf.com.au\/\" target=\"_blank\">Antipodean SF<\/a> (<em><a title=\"The Regersek Zone\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2212\">The Regersek Zone<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em><a title=\"Very short flash fiction piece\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2259\">Hindsight is a Bitch<\/a><\/em>). Nuke at Antipodean SF has been a great supporter, and I was very pleased to get a couple of pieces done for him.<\/p>\n<p>This year I decided to put my novel writing on hold and focus on a few shorter pieces, to try and get more &#8220;end to end&#8221; experience of writing something. The result was four pieces in addition to the published two above:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>11,000 word fantasy piece that I&#8217;m still tinkering with called\u00a0<em>The Reclaimers.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>5,000 word I guess you&#8217;d call it urban\/modern rural fantasy short story called\u00a0<em>Showdown<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>4,000 word science fiction piece called\u00a0<em>Wefting the Warp.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>600 word flash piece called\u00a0<em>Learning and Development.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I like all four, but it is fair to say that I have accumulated a lot of rejections on the last three so I don&#8217;t think that feeling is shared in the broader publishing community! Still, I&#8217;m very happy to have finished some pieces.<\/p>\n<p>2013 was a difficult year work wise and with a few family issues, so my writing fell away a lot, especially towards the end of the year. I wasn&#8217;t writing regularly enough and it became more and more difficult to pick up a pen or a keyboard and start typing. <a title=\"GenreCon 2013 \u2013 a running post\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2220\">Genrecon came along<\/a> and gave me a good kick in the backside and I&#8217;ve had a few weeks off over Christmas to hopefully do some battery recharging. Given I&#8217;m going back into work I figure I&#8217;m as recharged as I&#8217;m going to get, so I&#8217;ve decided on the following for 2014:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>I don&#8217;t like telling people I have 2\/3rds of an awful first draft of a novel. It&#8217;s a bit embarrassing. I&#8217;ve decided that I want to tell people that I have a <strong>full<\/strong> crappy first draft of a novel. Getting that last third of the novel out onto paper is a now a goal.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m going to rest my short stories for a couple of months and come back at them with fresh eyes. Given the feedback I&#8217;ve been getting they are just not good enough but I think I need a little distance before I can pull them apart effectively.<\/li>\n<li>I need to be writing more regularly. I&#8217;ve worked out that writing longhand, if I write one page in the notebooks I like to use it equates to about 100 words. I&#8217;ve set myself the goal of writing at least one page every day, even if it means staying up a bit later of an evening to do so. As is often the way, one page often turns into 2 or 3 or 10, but I think I&#8217;m going to have to keep this &#8220;slow and steady&#8221; approach or I&#8217;m never going to get anywhere.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;d like to try and get involved with the right writing group &#8211; somewhere where I can get feedback of course but also get more of a support network for my writing. Fitting something like a writing group in around my family and work commitments is difficult, but it is something I&#8217;d like to make time for. I&#8217;ve had some great support from some individual writers out there as well and I&#8217;d also like to continue to build that network.<\/li>\n<li>Assuming all this goes to plan, the back half of the year I&#8217;d like to spend time editing my crappy novel first draft into a slightly-less-crappy-but-still-crappy second draft.<\/li>\n<li>I enjoy writing the shorter pieces, so I&#8217;m hoping a couple more flash fiction stories might find their way onto the Antipodean SF website during the year.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Now, by writing all this down and putting it into the public domain I&#8217;m hoping I can embarrass myself into actually following through. So, if you see me around the traps feel free to ask how things are going. If I look shifty and try to distract you by asking if that is Elvis Presley in the corner, you&#8217;ll know things aren&#8217;t going so well!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\"><\/p>\n<p id=\"top\"><\/p>Hi,\n<p>Welcome to Mark Webb&#8217;s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse &#8211; I&#8217;ve only recently started writing and there isn&#8217;t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0<a title=\"All About Mark\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?page_id=11\">my biography<\/a>, see &hellip;<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[201,15,18],"class_list":["post-2322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","tag-musings","tag-specfic","tag-writing-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2322"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2329,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322\/revisions\/2329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}