Hi! Just a quick one today!
In my 2023 Writing Retrospective post, I listed some of the ongoing projects I was working on in the second half of last year. Splitting my focus between so many books meant I didn’t finish any of them. As we know, the only books you can edit, query and publish are finished ones, so I’ve taken a look at all the outlines and drafts I had in progress and selected one to work on exclusively.
The project is No Footings for a Bridge, a middle-grade fantasy novel currently sitting at 23,600 words as a ‘zero’ draft. I’ve cut it up into 50 chunks, each of which can be completed in one writing session of 3-5 hours, and placed them on a virtual backlog ready to be picked up. The plan is to finish the first draft by my birthday at the end of March, equating roughly to 3-4 chunks per week, and I hope that the book will come in somewhere around the 70-90k word mark so that it can be edited down to 60-70k later.
Speaking of edits, I will leave the book alone through April, then spend May on edits, aiming to get the book to beta readers by the end of June, the halfway mark of the year. Depending on feedback and the number of rounds of revisions needed, I’d like to query with it around September.
I will re-assess what to spend the majority of my writing time on during the ‘downtime’ phases of the project when I get there, but the current loose plan is to work on short stories that I can submit to literary magazines.
This is going to take a lot of time and headspace on top of the day job, so this blog will become a monthly event rather than weekly moving forward. You can look forward to lots of write-in segments, and I’ll pop general writing updates onto the end of those.
How will I meet my goal?
There are 2 main factors at play here: time and accountability. Luckily I have tricks for both.
Time
I will continue to host and/or attend writing meetups 5 evenings a week: one for the write-ins; one for miscellaneous writings, poetry and short stories; and three for writing this novel. That’s a total of about 20-25 hours per week, with two evenings free for playing video games, reading or mindlessly scrolling youtube without actually clicking on any of the videos.
Accountability
I have a writing buddy! Woo! We’re meeting every week to set weekly goals and check that we’ve completed last week’s, and we’ve agreed on tough love tactics, accepting no excuses. It’s quite exciting, as I haven’t had a writing buddy before.
This week we have a matching goal: write up beat sheets of our novels! I’ll be going over hers tonight with hopes of finding some useful questions to ask when we meet tomorrow!
How will I know that I’ve met my goal?
Well, I’ll have a first draft book written by the end of March, with edits going out to beta readers by the end of July and queries to literary agents by the end of September.
Summary for me to come back to at the end of the year:
- No Footings for a Bridge
- First draft complete by end of March
- Beta draft out to readers by end of June
- Queries out by end of September
- Blog
- 12 posts by end of year
- Optional
- 3 short stories submitted to magazines
Wish me luck!
Non Hughes 
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