Oh, February, is that you?  I didn’t see you standing there.  As you’ve probably noted, intelligent scamp that you are, things around here are a bit of a mess at the moment.  Please make yourself comfortable on the couch while I tidy up.  Have a biscuit?

January
The plan for January was less impossible than the plan for the coming months, since I didn’t even sit down and outline my yearly goals until about the fifteenth or so.  In January I wanted merely to complete a draft of the short story I’m working on and then start in earnest on the novel that I’m writing with my compatriot (Coming Soon!).

Words: 9,461

Flubs:
I did not get a rough draft of Volunteer Vampires completed.  I got hung up in the science of it, which I think I need to just stop doing for right now.  It’s already mad and impossible that there are vampires in space in the 19th century, I’m probably just wasting time worrying over whether they could locate the source of a message being beamed from deep space.  I know that my novel co-writer likes to tinker out the science and make sure it’s technically possible, but I also know that scifi doesn’t always need that information.  Hell, I just re-watched Ghost in the Shell last night, and while they spend a lot of time hemming and hawing over what a ‘person’ is, they spend absolutely no time talking about how it’s possible for the Major’s camouflage to work the way it does or how androids work.  They’re just accepted parts of the world.  I think I’m at the stage where I need to accept things and move on with the story.  If it’s really important that they pinpoint where a sound is coming from I can work on it in edits.

I also did not get more than a chapter into the Steampunk novel we’re working on.  We’ve been talking about it for years now and trying to get all the pieces in the right places and I’ve been itchy to just write things for months.  I need to get on that so I can have better, more accomplished news at the beginning of next month.

Follow throughs:
However, we did get a good, solid outline down.  And even though there are still a few niggling questions, I at least feel like I know enough about what’s happening between our characters and where they are in the first half of the book that I can just sit down and start to get it out.  That’s a good feeling.

I also wrote a silly poem and tinkered about with, not only other bits of the Steampunk, but the Big Damn Existential Science Fiction Novel, which is the third novel length thing in the stall at the moment.  So many ideas, so little execution.  But well, that’s what I’m out to cure this year.

Words To Date: 9,461

February
The plan for February is to hit the ground running, catch up with January, and then execute the following:
Have a completed draft of Volunteer Vampires done and sent to my betas. Make sure that by the end of the month it’s ready to submit to the anthology I’m assuming is happening.  *fingers crossed*

Have a rough draft of half of the Steampunk novel.

Write a poem to submit…somewhere.  I’ll need to go through that issue of Poets & Writers I bought and look at different markets.  I fully admit that poetry is not a part of the industry I usually keep an eye on. And it’s all just kind of a silly bet with myself, really.  We’ll see where that goes.

So, that’s that.  Should be easy enough, provided I just sit down and do it.  If ChairToBum glue was a thing, I would look into buying stock for it.