Time for a new writing project
Normally I like starting challenges and projects on the first of a month, like National Novel Writing Month1 in November or Million Words in a Year (MilWordY)2 in January, but I don't want to wait to get started on something. So I'm going to just go for it, even if it's the 8th and not the 1st.
The Plan
Starting tomorrow and for the next 30 days, I will be blogging every day, sharing my progress and thought process of the creation of a new writing project. I'm not setting a finish deadline for the project (except a vague "90 days would be nice"), but I'm only committing to 30 days of blogging about it so I don't overwhelm myself. Perhaps after the 30 days I'll continue to update weekly if I find I enjoy making the posts.
Within each blog post, I will report my progress; explain a little bit about the worldbuilding, story, or characters; and talk about the pieces of inspiration that came together for this project. If I have a line I'm particularly proud of, I may share that as well.
The Goal
My goal for this is to 1) document my progress, 2) organize my thoughts from inspiration and 3) give myself a form of accountability to keep going. And maybe 4) inspire someone else to work on their creative project. I hope to do a little bit of writing and a little bit of planning each day, but I'm not going to force myself with word count goals. Instead, I want to write for at least 10 minutes, and plan for at least 10 minutes. And if inspiration or flow strikes and I go past that, all the better.
The Project
For the last few days I've had a concept bouncing around in my head like a pinball, trying to form a coherent story. It's a more religious idea than I usually have, and also a lot more philosophical, which makes sense because a lot of religious ideas are philosophical ideas. But it comes as a sort of culmination of ideas and concepts and media that I have absorbed over the last year or so.
The elevator pitch: It's a science fantasy story about a young nun on a spaceship cathedral who finds herself stranded alone with a stranger and must confront her own beliefs about the universe in order to find her way home.
Obviously there's more to it than that, but it's really hard to condense a full story into a single line.
I'm excited about this project. The concept, the pitch, the ideas, it feels like it has good bones and a certain unnamable something that I've been searching for to represent what I want a writing career to look like. Who knows, maybe this could be the One for publishing.
P.S. I will also try to continue my usual random topics blogging twice a week, which means I'm in for a lot of blogging :)
Thoughts to share? I have a contact page now!
The organization of NaNoWriMo collapsed a couple of years ago under the weight of too many terrible scandals, and I am forever salty about that.↩
I have never been successful at this, though I have tried a couple of times. As a working woman, I just don't have the time or energy to write nearly 3,000 words a day every single day without break for a full year.↩