Two posts, one day!

In more personal news, I have an appreciation/review of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets up at Tordotcom today. Here's a sneak peek and then you can follow the link to the rest of the article and COMMENT over there:

After you’ve defeated a Dark Lord, come home and found life goes on as normal, how do you return to faerieland? How do you get back to Narnia? How do you make something feel even more magical and wondrous than when it was brand new?

Well, a flying car and a murderous tree is a pretty good way to start.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was one of the very first “what happens after” books I’d read. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was a great adventure book in which the boy turns out to be a wizard, a celebrity, a hero, and then defeats the Dark Lord all over again. But Chamber of Secrets shows what happens next and that fascinated me.

And then there was the psychology of a budding Dark Lord, an ambiguous, strange elf-creature, a truly fabulous dueling club, the history and redemption of Harry’s first friend and, of course, Lockhart.

To-do list for the year

Finish a rough draft of On Your Mark
Finish the Nocturne
Finish the Quirk Pitch
Finish Gulfcoast Highway
Outline Get Set and Go.
Sell one short story
Sell one poem

This should be approximately 105-110,000 words for the year. If OYM is approximately 80-85,000, Nocturne should be 10-15,000 and the Quirk and Water Story should put me over the edge.

Which would be pretty impressive, since in previous years I have written - and then abandoned - no more than 20,000 or so tops. Fortunately the poem is more in the revising land than anything else.

Perhaps, if I'm doing really well, I can even let myself kind of do nanowrimo without it stressing me out too much. I don't have to do all 50,000, but even if I got 20-30,000 for November, that would happily finish off my year.

I mean, part of me wants to make ludicrous goals like finish OYM by the summer and then revise that in the fall and start GS in the fall while also putting in some serious time on my depressing little gay-in-the-south book and also why not get started on Magicians in London again, and meanwhile what about that zombie story I wanted to write and also the female noir story and what happened to my Rapunzel story, etc,etc. And you know what? It's nice to have all these options. But I'm going to take it slow and steady for now.

Speaking of which. I should see if I can bang out at least 500 words today. (Also write a memo for my work website.)

5078 / 110000 words. 5% done!