I haven’t been trying to be mysterious about my goals and my business plan, although I’m not about to post the whole freaking thing here, but discussion over at Jordan’s on the topic of long range goals made me want to be a little more specific about the whole goals/plan thing.
First of all, I believe in having a plan. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, how will you know when you get there? Further, if you aren’t living according to your own plan, you’re likely to find yourself drifting along with somebody else’s. Which is fine if you don’t mind that, but you might end up someplace you never wanted to be. Or going all over the place as various others direct. Maybe I’m just a noncomformist at heart, but that gives me hives. If I find myself going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, I want it to be because I thought it was a brilliant idea, not because somebody else thought I should and I went along with it.
So. If you’re in business, you have a business plan and make no mistake, writing is a business. If you don’t think so, you’ll find out in a hurry that publishers have a different view. A business plan is not hard to create. There’s software that walks you through it, there are books that lay out how to do it on a fill-in-the-blanks level. It makes you get very clear about what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to do it. Including things like marketing and PR. You won’t go to writer hell if you don’t have a business plan, but to quote a friend of mine, “I’m not saying he has to have a five year plan, but he ought to at least have a five minute plan.”
My impulses described a couple of posts back are more than that, in other words. I pay attention to my creative leadings, but I also look at them in terms of my big picture. Write for RT fits in how? The following ways. #1, I love RT. #2, I find articles a fun creative challenge. #3, RT is THE magazine for romance readers and industry professionals and having my byline there would be smart business.
If you don’t love something, I firmly believe that no matter how much money is involved or how much sense it makes on a business level, it’s not a good fit in the big picture. If I didn’t love RT or writing articles, I wouldn’t make pitching there a goal.
Novellas: I really, really enjoyed the structural challenge of writing for the Ellora’s Cavemen anthology. Novellas and quickie-length stories are a terrific technical challenge that I want to do more of. They also allow for different types of stories than you could do in a novel. There isn’t a lot of room for subplots and extended cast of characters, which allows a very tight focus on the main characters. That in itself is very fun. Also anthologies are a good way to get noticed by new readers. Reader picks up the book for Author A, discovers new author and goes looking for more. Being in more anthologies fits in with my goal of growing my readership, plus I like anthologies and think they’re fun and I love the creative/technical challenge they present.
The synopsis I’m working on is for a new opportunity I’m interested in pursuing. When the Blaze line first came out I was very excited about it. And then I discovered that the vision for the line was a Cosmo Girl/Sex in the City tone and that’s just not me. I still have some Blaze keepers on my shelf, but overall, I found the line not a good match for the kind of story I produce and I’ve never submitted there. But now Blaze has been expanded. Blaze Extreme is coming and they’re looking for stories with a Red Shoe Diaries tone. That made my little heart go pit-a-pat because I consider Red Shoe Diaries some of the best programming for adults ever broadcast.
When the original Red Shoe Diaries episode aired it knocked my socks off. I was hooked. I haven’t forgotten it, either. Those stories were edgy, erotic, emotionally intense and peopled by unforgettable characters. If Blaze is going there, I’m interested. Very interested. Enough to beat myself up with the task of writing a synopsis for an unfinished story that has that tone so I can send it to the Blaze contest and see if it flies.
So today I’m still working on that synopsis. It might well take me right up to the contest deadline to be satisfied with it, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do right. And I’m not going to run out of sludge or coffee in the process.
*I’d link to Jordan Summer’s site for the related discussion there, but I’m getting an error there instead of the site now. Internet gremlins!
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