I’ve decided that my New Year’s resolution is “Be Better About Blogging.” I’ve also decided that waiting until the actual New Year to try to implement this resolution is stupid, so I’m going start now and maybe by the time New Year’s actually rolls around, I’ll be in the habit of doing it. A girl can hope, anyway.
(Note: I’ve been reading George R.R. Martin recently. It’s interesting comparing the book to the show; just as with the show, I find Tyrion and Arya to be my favorites, though I like Book-Sansa much earlier than I liked Show-Sansa. I promise, I don’t actually refer to myself as “a girl”. Too often.)
We’re traveling for the holidays this year, which is always entertaining when you figure in trans-Atlantic plane trips and time zones and naps denied from the 2yo, who tells me he is Big and does not need them and then falls asleep anyway. Mostly I’m looking forward to shopping at Trader Joe’s and buying a very large industrial-size bag of brown sugar.
At the moment, though, I’m trying to decide what the writing priority should be. I have, sitting in my Documents folder, my 80,000 word Nano novel, which I’ve steadily ignored since November 30. It needs quite a lot of work – I kinda changed the plot and character motivations as I wrote. Also their job titles and personal histories. Sometimes mid-sentence, even. So there’s a whole bunch of rewriting in my future for that book.
But also… a friend prompted me with a holiday story for some of my fanfic, and once I got started on that… I realized that I was essentially writing such an AU of the original ‘verse that I might as well break it out and make it wholly original. And I really, really want to try doing that, especially now that I’m surrounded by holiday anyway so it’d be easy to feed that into the story. (Granted, I’d end up sitting on it for a full year before publishing it, but I’m okay with that.)
It’s extremely tempting to ignore the editing and write the holiday story the way I’d like to write it. But that would mean putting off work on a story that should undoubtedly be published earlier. And considering I’ve had a lean year in terms of publishing, I’m not sure how much I should be putting it off. And scrubbing fanfic is hard work – I did it once, many, many years ago, and it was tremendously difficult. I’m not sure I was entirely successful, and I haven’t done it since. Granted, we’re talking about a 5,000-word story that I’d rewrite into a 50,000+ word story… so it wouldn’t be quite as tricky. But the challenge is still there. (And don’t let anyone tell you it’s as simple as running a search-and-replace on names. Unless you’re exceedingly lazy, it’s much more work than that.)
Maybe I should flip a coin…
