Ah June. The last month of the school year. The meteorological start of summer. The start of the long, hot, humid days that call us to the beach, the swimming pool, the barbeques, and the air conditioning. For me, it’s also the chance to spend time outside, both with my family and with my notebooks. The summer months are my most productive when it comes to writing; without the interruption of a job and the persistent distractions, I can really dig deeper into some of the projects I have in the works.
My main goal for this summer is to focus on the dialogue pass for the second book in my YA series. If I can get through the bulk of that by the end of August, it will put me in great position to successfully complete the NaNo month and achieve one of my goals for the year. To that end, I have some crisp, clean new notebooks, refills for my main writing implement, some fresh choices of writing music, and a solid grasp on many of the characters I will be writing dialogue for. As I get to the back half of the book (the section that I struggled with for months, but you already know all about that because you’ve been reading my blog, right?), there is a large crew of new characters that I am still working on speech patterns for. They all live in the same small town, so I’m looking at dialect choices, pronunciations, word choices and idioms that reflect the environment they live in.
Since I am never working on just one thing, I have other projects to work on when I am not writing dialogue for that book. I have a couple of short stories that are in first-draft phase that I would like to finish, plus at least two other ideas that I would like to develop more. When I am not working on writing stories, there is the editing for book one of the YA series that I have been chipping away at, an in-progress series of blog posts about the system and process I use when crafting stories, and the beginnings of the querying agents project which I have just started researching and digging into as well.
And I am still sitting on a couple of pieces of news that I will hopefully be able to post about sometime soon. I’m really excited about that, and the posts themselves are already written – I will share the good stuff with you as soon as I can!
With that cliffhanger, let’s look at my goals for 2024:
1 – I want finish editing book one of my YA series to the point that I consider it good enough for publication (it probably won’t be, but I want to get it as far as I can take it). I am still doing my second pass through book one, focusing on dialogue and continuity. It has been taking a long time because I am reading it out loud (when no one is around). Once I work through that, I will let it sit for a while as my wife goes over my changes.
2 – I want to begin querying agents to see if I can publish that book, and its sequels, traditionally. I have drafted three different versions of a query letter. I have considered having a professional look at one of them to give me some pointers, but I will sand down the rough edges first.
3 – I want to finish the first draft of book 2 in that series and begin outlining book 3 with an aim at starting the writing process this year as well. I am progressing well with this, but I still have a long way to go. This is my main project for the summer.
4 – I want to have at least 2 short stories accepted for publication (not ones I submitted in 2023). No Spoilers!!
5 – I want to extend my visibility as far as social interactions and publicity goes. The Facebook needle is moving slowly. I’m hoping that some publication news in the coming months will really get this ball rolling forward more.