Coming Soon: I sent in the contract so now it’s official. ROPED aka Christmas Cowboy, will be out in 2012! Watch for Cowboy Lust from Cleis Press. So hello December, nice to meet you with something on the schedule for the new year, officially. Unofficially, I do have a lot in the hopper but with no dates yet. That will change quickly now that the baby is obligingly taking naps, something she just didn’t do for the first few months of life. (I read her the baby sleep guide and explained she was supposed to sleep around 15 hours instead of 8 per 24, but she ignored that.)
Nano officially ended, so now’s a good time to look at what worked and what didn’t going forward. For me, what didn’t work was the baby’s schedule (see above, not sleeping) and I also realized very quickly that the story needed more development; research, outlining, all that boring stuff. NaNo was kind of experimental for me this year in that I wanted to see if I could just wing it, and what I learned was that even though I have to figure out a certain amount of the story as I go, I do need at least a rudimentary grasp on it. I will never be a detailed outliner, but I need at least a flexible framework in place. Sometimes it’s worth experimenting just to learn these things. So that story has gone into the “needs development” stage and I’m back to working on the books that are not only well developed but a good chunk done.
I also started dayjobbing last month, and have had a chance to see how that will work with writing and a baby. Fairly well, as it turns out. The dayjob work is part time and flexible (Drupal) but allows me to handle things like financial planning without the giant guesswork involved in writing income. Also, if I put in 20 hours a week for the company, we qualify for better insurance. Practical considerations like this actually free you up to be more creative, so as the year ends, now is a really good time to think through how writing and life are working and how they can work better. Because the real value of NaNo is figuring out how to put what you’ve learned into practice for the other 11 months of the year.
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