Writing Plans...

One of my big resolutions for the year ahead is to keep writing. It sounds simple, but it's been harder than it sounds in the recent past. There've been a LOT of stories begun and precious few finished and there've been several long gaps where writing has been the last thing on my mind, so my intent for 2010 is to be able to have at least one completed project to show for each month. (More, of course, would be lovely, but I'm trying to be realistic here!) Given the sheer number of projects I have on the go, though, only working on one thing (or even only a couple of things) is still going to leave me with a lot of WIPs come this time next year, so with that in mind, I'm going to set out a little bit of a general schedule (so's I've got a rough idea of which fandom I'm working in) and then set up my aims for January.

General Schedule
Some of these fandoms only have one WIP in, so this is something that will probably get revisited over the course of the year. Posts relating to this will use the tag "schedule: general"

Evening	Fandom	Online Status
Monday	Star Wars	On
Tuesday	CSI	On
Wednesday	Original fic	Off
Thursday	Airwolf	On
Friday	Chalet School	Off

I'm not factoring in the weekends at this point, because they're my chief "do stuff" days, so there's never any guarantee I'm going to get to sit down at the 'puter for any extended periods! That means anything I get done in that time is pure bonus.

It's also worth noting that I may well be able to dodge in some writing during the day, but as I can't exactly rely on that (after all, I'm paid for something else entirely!), I'm not factoring that in here either.

The on/off line status is intended to be a guide so that, if you're looking for me to chat to, you know WHEN to look.

Monthly Schedule
Posts about these will pop up, usually, on or around the 1st of each month. I'm aiming to review what I've managed to do and set up what I want to accomplish for the month ahead. These posts will be tagged "schedule: monthly"

January Big Project: Freya's Daughter
For more information on Freya's Daughter, visit my Dreamwidth account

January Finishing Project: A Woman Alone
I am (as I think I've mentioned a couple of times) really quite close to getting this story wrapped up and I think it would be a good start to the New Year if I can cross off one of my three longest-standing WIPs!

January Ongoing Work:
The other stuff I'm going to be working on
CSI - Learning To Fly universe (in general); Red Rain in particular
Star Wars - Isard's Grip
Airwolf - Soaring Eagle
Chalet School - Difficulties for Francie (once AWA is finished, at least)

So that's January set up.

Any questions?

Freya's Daughter

As my main project for January, it seems like a good time to talk a little more in-depth about this, so what I'm going to do is try and outline where the story currently stands, what I'm aiming to do and a little bit about the basic plot.

I'll start with the plot (as that's probably the bit that most people are interested in!). Freya's Daughter (FD from here on) is basically the story of a college/university student, Carrie Evans, who finds herself caught up in an ancient struggle between good - as embodied by Odin, Freya and the rest of the Norse pantheon - and evil - as embodied by Loki, the Norse trickster.

What Carrie learns is that Loki, in an effort to out pace the fate laid out for him in the Ragnarok prophecy, bound Asgard shut, trapping the Norse Gods there and giving him free reign in Mitgard. At least, that was his plan. Unfortunately for Loki, both Odin and Freya took steps to counter him, and that's where Carrie comes in as the latest in the line of avatars for Freya.

It's not exactly something Carrie feels comfortable with! But, as things heat up, it's also not something she can deny.

With her in the adventure are a couple of her friends - Dan Symonds and Rebecca McFadden - and several characters out of Norse mythology - Hermod, Munin and, of course, Loki. There's also quite a large supporting cast, which includes the rest of Carrie's circle of friends (who go on to play bigger roles in the subsequent follow up stories...which I'm not going to get into here!) and pretty much all the major players from Norse mythology.

So that's the basic plot.

The story, as it was written for NaNo 2006, was set in the Haverford/Rosemont/Ardmore/Bryn Mawr area of Pennsylvania and did feature one or two chapters that were pretty blatant padding to get the story to stretch out to the required 50,000 words. In other words, the geography is iffy (!) and the story telling could definitely use quite a bit of tightening up.

In the subsequent stories, it's suited me to relocate the whole story/setting to the UK - partly because of the demands of the stories, partly because it makes the geography easier - so one of the big things I need to do for FD is a full relocation. I also need to de-Americanise the dialogue which is a fairly major effort on its own!

Once that's done, I've then got to look at the padding issues, some of which are as simple as doing as Hemmingway advised and ditching the adjectives and some of which...aren't. The biggest problem here being how to feed in the relevant Norse information without resorting to the current solution, which is El Grande Infodump!

So, in some ways, what I'm looking at is largely a complete rewrite of the story and in other ways, it's just a tune up. Whether I can get ALL the work done in January is a little up for debate, but I can certainly get quite a big chunk of it done and, if I can polish up chapters 1-3, I can look to get the submission process going while I finish off the rest.