Once More Unto The (Writing) Breach- January 2017

What I’ve Accomplished This Month

Double the Baggins, Twice the Took– 4 chapters posted, 6,498 words written

I realized about halfway through this month that I’m running out of chapters! When I started posting this fic last year, I started with a large cache of first draft chapters to work with, not to mention notes and scenes for many chapters after. So I got lazy. I stopped worrying about the writing, confident that I would have plenty of time to get more words down before it became a problem. Well, those days are now over. Time has run out. So I had to start writing this month, and I got a surprising amount of work done, for being so under prepared.

Magical 221B– 2,510 words written

This isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense to you unless you follow me on Ravelry, a social knit and crochet site that I spend an inordinate amount of time on. On that site, there is a forum board called the Harry Potter Knit and Crochet House Cup (HPKCHC for short) in which members are Sorted into the four Hogwarts Houses, and then compete for points by completing projects. It’s a lot cooler than it sounds ;P Anyway, part of the competition involves a bit of roleplay, and though I don’t normally get super in-depth with that part of the game, a particular prompt caught my eye this month and I’ve been compelled to write a story: a Sherlock/Harry Potter mashup with knitting. Basically, I’m knitting a pattern broken down into five parts, and I’m writing a five part story to correspond with each portion of the project I complete. It’s a mystery. There are fairies. And goblins. And Sherlock is a Squib who solves crime with his Muggle flatmate, and takes great pleasure in making Mycroft’s job as the Ministry of Magic liaison to the British government as difficult as possible.

If anyone is interested in reading this silly little thing, but doesn’t particularly want to create a Ravelry account (understandable), let me know in the comments and I will make the parts available on AO3, complete with pictures 🙂

The Stars Are Fire Pre-Editing

Non-quantifiable, but I really did work on the pre-editing phase for my novel. I have character sheets, world-building notes (hey, my planets have names and stuff!), some techie details that will hopefully get me through into beta-reading and outside editing. Speaking of which:

What’s Coming Up in February

The Stars Are Fire Revision

February is the major edit for “The Stars Are Fire”. I have 28 days to edit 53,000 words. God help me. In case anyone is curious, I use Holly Lisle’s One Pass Manuscript Revision method and it has literally changed the way I think about editing. It’s daunting, but once it’s done, I know it’s been done to the best of my ability. I’ve used this method with both of my Avengers fanfictions (“Worth Living For” and “Clarity“) and the results have been overwhelmingly positive, so I feel confident using it on my original work.

Post two chapters of DBTT, Write 10,000 new words

As previously stated, I’m running out of chapters. Which means I’ve started making mistakes. And that’s not acceptable. So I’ve decided to take a little bit of a break from posting DBTT, switching from weekly to twice a month, to give myself a little bit of breathing room. This will also give me more time to do the actual writing and give me the kind of distance I need to edit my chapters before they’re posted. I’m hoping I can write another 10k words this month, which should give me a good start.

Write two more parts of Magical 221B (~2,000 words)

This will put me on track to complete this story (and my knitting) right on schedule 🙂

Try again to start pre-writing for Good Intentions

This was a big ol’ failboat this month.

I wanted to do it. Unfortunately, my big plans to use dictation to make it possible were derailed by a little thing we here in the States call Daylight Savings Time. Basically, it’s dark by the time I get home from work, and I am not going out walking and talking to myself in the dark. So, I’m going to try something different to get the ball rolling on this, I’ll let you know how it goes!

And now, (what I know you’ve all been waiting for) the cute animal of the month!

I present to you, the lykoi– also known as the Werewolf cat! And yes, it is a real thing 🙂