January 4, 2017

Not A Resolution, But A Plan For 2017

Writing a book seems at times like a mountain of monumental proportions. I know that a book is written one word at a time, but the mountain is not any smaller because of it. Many well intentioned folks are now declaring their resolution for 2017. I am sceptical of life changing decisions made in a rush over a few drinks of champagne, so I like to keep my resolutions somewhat abstract. I think of them as a philosophy rather than a specific goal.

So rather than making the resolution to write a book in 2017, I have, instead, a plan.

I am now preparing for a second draft of my first novel, and I have decided to create a calendar for the book as a whole, and plan out all the tasks and milestones ahead.

This is my book laid out for 2017:

This is basically 9 months of work including planning of the book, writing, editing and publishing. I tried to make it all fit in half the time and I had to accept that I can’t commit to that goal. Estimating projects is quite complicated and estimating the time for a project that you have never done before is even more so. So 9 months it is!

When I first thought about writing this book I wanted to complete it in 3-4 months. Then after failing, I decided that NaNoWriMo (1 month), would be even a better idea (genius, I know). Now that I failed a second time, I decided to make a detailed plan of how I am planning on getting to the top of this mountain before I lose my oxygen.

So that’s it. A roadmap to a novel.

January 4, 2017

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