A month of writing and a draft to show for it

Last month I vowed two things...to write every day, and to work on my "The Wonder Kid" story until I had a draft I could send to friends to read.

I'm happy to report that I did both of those things. And the combination of the two goals worked pretty well to get me to do more work.

This month I'm going to try for something similar, but the new goal is to finish a draft of a new story, "Dragon Hunter". Whereas "The Wonder Kid" is one I've been working on for quite a while and a longer one, about 18k words, "Dragon Hunter" is really new, I've only had the idea since about May, and is intended to be short, around 5k words.

Heh. I thought "The Wonder Kid" was going to be really short too. In fact I wrote a fairly complete draft of it in short order back a couple of years ago when I first had the idea. And then I reworked it and nuanced it and complicated it and wrote an ending and then replanned the whole thing around a different ending and...meh. I hope I won't be doing any of that rigamarole with "Dragon Hunter" but I can't promise that. What I can do, though, is set a goal to have a readable draft by the end of this month. Like I just said. And maybe that will make the difference.

Let's hope so, because I'd like to prove I can write a short story in less than two years.

I was gonna end this post there, but I don't think I can do that. I have to defend myself against myself. :) I can write a Madrigal Dinner play script in a month, month-and-a-half. The difference is structure and outside requirements/outside deadlines...deadlines outside of ME. It's harder to resist an episode of Law and Order if the only deadline enforcer is me. Whereas when I know I have to turn something in to another person, I'll skip all TV and write for two to three hours a night for a whole week. I know because I did that this May. :)