Writing Plan for 2005 (Q1, anyway)

Emboldened by my success writing and publishing Asteroid Burn, I have an aggressive writing plan for the first quarter of 2005.

For a few years I've had the ambition of writing the history of the Italian mafia during the 20th century in a series of ten novels, one book for each decade. I don't know if I'll actually follow through on all ten, but I'm going to start the first one as 2005 dawns.

I'm declaring January to be National Novel Researching Month (NaNoReMo), when I'll challenge myself to conduct 50 hours of research on this new writing project in 31 days. (Anyone's welcome to join me! Be sure to post your interest on this NaNoReMo thread.)

There are many folks who plan to relive the thrill of NaNoWriMo this coming February, as you can see in the FebNoWriMo forum. I'll be joining them, with the intention of writing the first 50,000 words of my first mafia novel in that unusually short month.

March is National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo), and I plan to join thousands of others in doing 50 hours of editing and rewriting in 30 days. I'll be working on "Divided Loyalties", a Cold War espionage novel I wrote in college, to get it into publishable form.

Not sure what's beyond March...more work on all of these projects, I'm sure. In the meantime, I'm spending December cleaning my garage (NaGarCleMo), and working informally on another writing idea, a story about a burnt-out personal success coach who finds his passion reignited from an unexpected source.

What an exciting time to be alive...the age of Chris Baty and NaNoWriMo.

2005 is going to be a banner year!

By the way, if you like watching the creative process at work, you might check out Peter Jackson's video diary as he makes the 2005 version of King Kong. Very exciting to watch his work unfold. (Peter Jackson, you will remember, was the director of the marvelous, Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy.)