Yeah, so, I promised myself and others *cough*kitty_bandit  *cough* that I would post in my journal more. So, here I go.

Let’s see, what to report. I’m back at work here in lovely Hancock. I love my job, mostly because it pays great (for this area anyway), has health insurance, and lets me stay close to home. But my true life’s goal is to be a novelist.

I’m not saying I want to be the next J. K. Rowling or even Christopher Paolini. It’d be nice to be rich, but I really just want to be read. That’s my dream: to have a novel published and have people read it and think, “Hey, that was pretty good.”

To that goal, New Year’s resolution #2 is to write at least 2,000 words a day. At that rate, I can do about 50,000 words as month. That’s a pretty decent sized novel (about 100 pages typed). I was inspired by my NaNo WriMo book and Janet Evanovich’s How I Write. The theme of the first is just keep writing and fix anything wrong in the editing phase. I read it a while ago and it had great points, but I wasn’t inspired to write until I read Evanovich’s tales of supporting her family by writing a romance novel every month.

So, my new writing method is to outline a story and plot characters as much as I can, but not stop to hammer out every detail. Then, I describe the novel in scenes, or just list the most interesting scenes (the ones I really want to write). That’s all day one. Then I begin writing those scenes and, eventually, string them together into a roughly novel shaped thing. By the end, the character’s names and back stories and personalities may have been completely rehashed about five times. But I touch all that up in the editing phase.

I started this mid December and I’m cranking along pretty good on my current novel. So, to combine my two New Year’s resolutions, I shall try to post every day and announce my writing progress. That way I have somewhere to check in (much like NaNo WriMo). So, here’s today’s:

Writing Progress:
Title: The Unicorn Prince (Working Title)
Words: 41,990 of 50,000
Progress Today: 990 of 3,000 (catching up due to vacation laziness)