Tag: “What You Don’t See”

May Writing Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

pinkflowerApril turned out to be quite a productive month for me, quite unintentionally really.

I finished the latest round of revisions on The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys as well as the first drafts of all five of the potential script contest entries (first fifteen pages and one-page synopsis) before I left for Chicago. Part of the purpose of going to Chicago, besides seeing friends and eating orange chicken, was to be able to work on my writing without interruption or distraction. I found myself in a hotel room with no major writing project demanding my attention as I was still undecided what script to do for the contest. I ended up polishing “What You Don’t See” and “Short Hallway” (I polished a haunted hotel story in a hotel room while watching 1408 because my commitment to a theme cannot be denied) and got about a third of Voice polished before I left. A productive short trip despite the anxiety troubles I had.

I finished polishing Voice after I got home. I then turned my attention to the script contest. I ended up picking one called Open Christmas Eve and did my best to get those first fifteen pages perfect. I hit the “What the fuck am I doing? I can’t do this! I have no idea what I’m doing. This is pointless” wall Friday night, got my “Fuck it” second wind Saturday afternoon, and after a few more tweaks and some polishing, I submitted it Saturday night. I recognize that it’s probably a waste of an entry fee (and only with extreme luck will I even win that entry fee back), but I still did it. There is some kind of accomplishment in pushing myself to explore different forms of writing.

Speaking of, April was National Poetry Month and as an exercise I made myself write at least four lines of poetry a day. They’re just scraps of poems, nothing glorious, and I have no idea what, if anything, I’ll do with them (I posted one on my Instagram at the end of the month to celebrate), but it was a fun little project.

After all of that in April, what’s to be done in May?

I’m going to completely finish The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys. It needs a little more revision (just some tweaks), a beta read, and a polish. Once that’s done, I’ll get to work putting together the ghost story collection. I’m also going to work on finishing the first draft of Open Christmas Eve. Now that it’s submitted, the rest of the script should be easy to finish and I’ll feel like less of a cheat having the whole thing written.

I sort of feel like spending the summer writing a short novel. I’ve got the idea (actually, I have two ideas, but I think I’m going to save one for NaNo) and I think I’ll spend some time this month working on fleshing it out.

No worries about getting bored. Still plenty left on my To Do List of Doom.

February Writing Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

roseLast month I finished the first drafts of “Short Hallway” and “What You Don’t See”, which were both a real slog for some reason. I also wrote, revised, polished, and submitted a short story called “Don’t Feed the Animals” to a contest. It was one of those rare stories that came out pretty much done in the first draft. It just needed some minor tweaks. Pretty handy since I needed to have it ready to go in only a few weeks.

I think I was going to try to write and enter two stories because at the time I had two ideas, but when it came time to focus, I only had “Don’t Feed the Animals” in my head. I can’t for the life of me remember what the other idea was. Oh well. It was either a moment of brilliance lost forever or it was an idea better forgotten. I’ll never know.

This month I’m going to go back to revising Voice. I’ve done the structural changes and I’ve made all of the notes. In theory, this shouldn’t be much of a challenge to fix, but I haven’t been able to bank on anything lately. It’s been a tough go mentally as of late for me (but that’s another post).

If I somehow get done with Voice, then I’ll move on to revising something else that’s going into the ghost anthology because there’s a lot of revising needed to be done for that.

I’m going to be doing so much revising this year.

So much.

January Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

SnowflowerNew year, new stuff. And old stuff. The stuff never ends, really.

I’m finishing up a couple of short stories, “What You Don’t See” and “The Short Hallway”, for the ghost story anthology I’m working on. They’re the last two I needed first drafts of. From here on out, it’ll all be revising and polishing for that book. As of right now, it’s the only one I’m planning on putting out in 2016.

I didn’t get as much revised on Voice as I would have liked, but I did get the important structural stuff that needed to be changed done. Now it’s just a matter of doing the rest of the heavy lifting and I’ll probably get to that next month.

A short story contest came across one of my social media feeds and I’m going to do something for it. It’s literary, not strictly genre, but it’s no fees and you can enter up to two stories and I’ve got a couple of ideas that might work.

Can I write, revise, and polish two short stories in a month?

Sure.

Why not?