My 2012 Creative Schedule

I'm a busy bee, or at least I INTEND to be a busy bee a lot. Here's to my compulsive listing complex for helping me organize the remainder of my creative year. Seems to be the only way I ever finish anything, when a deadline is looming. But wonder how much I coulda finished if I did some of those creative things INSTEAD of making this chart. Oh, well... :D

Here's part of my creative chart for the rest of the year. I'll be updating it frequently on my website, hopefully with plenty of ahead-schedule notifications and checkmarks of completion, but possibly with sad notes of deadline extensions.

MONTH	NOVELS	MYTH-BABIES	ART	RAGDOLLS
May	Silver Empress Rough Draft	1. Functional Sculpt, BJD 2. MB-Reborn 1-3: Cutesies for sale	1. Begin novel illustrations and cover designs, drafting 2. Illustration Collages, for sale (Finished: 1 of 10)	1. Complete Heritage Collection, for sale 2. All clothes
June	1. Silver Empress Revised Draft, Story Adjustments 2. Full Second Draft, Incorporate Changes	1. Refine MB-BJD sculpt appearance 2. Cast joints, hands and feet in resin 3. Prep major body sections for molding. Test-string for balance.	1. Decide on list of novel illustrations and finalize compositions 2. Draft Silver Empress covers and lettering 3. Sketches for Unatan and Azelan World Profile THS website content	On hold until Heritage Collection is sold and 2nd novel is published

Full Creative Schedule:
http://www.tamarahensonstudios.com/schedule.htm

Cuddles,
Tamara

NOVEL DEADLINE!

Creative things are dragging along. I'm not sleeping enough, or eating right, or working on my book enough. All three may be related, I realized. Trying to fix that this week with a new deadline: By mid-February, I plan on having volume one revised, polished and uploaded to Kindle, at least. Here's my to-do list to make that happen:

1. Revise and Polish manuscript. (15 chapters left!)
2. Finish, refine cover for both eBook and regular book.
3. Format for Kindle and regular book.
4. Order ISBN and UPC codes.
5. Upload, submit and approve final prints!
6. Repeat for every other platform... (after initial deadline!)
7. Dive into next book and short story edit. (after initial deadline!)

It seems like a lot, but once I'm past number one, it should be mostly technical instead of creative-technical. That means, in my mind, it'll be simply time-consuming, not soul-consuming! :D Operation Get-Finished-So-I-Can-Sleep-Again begins tonight!

Cuddles,
Tamara

VOLUME ONE, ROUGH DRAFT: COMPLETE!!!

The rough draft of Volume 1 is officially finished! I finished at 59, 026 words. I plan on celebrating with preliminary editing and organization of my notes. Tonight. Not now. Now, I eat breakfast. With any luck, I will be able to taste it. Thank you, Mr. Sinusy-Cold-Thing, for helping me to finish my book. :)

I've already completed a first read-through of everything up through page 174-ish, so I'm a step ahead there. The initial read-through with minimal editing is crucial to fixing the overall flaws before I fine tune anything. (Thank you for the basics of logic, Stephen King: On Writing!)

The last chapter and a half are a jumble of sketchy present-tense notetaking and straight third-person POV prose (hence ROUGH draft), but I think it'll edit out okay once I'm not relying on the Dayquil to get me through it. I go with the Moe Conn theatre adage "Done is good" in this case. The things I wanted to happen, happened, in some ways more abbreviated than others. In other ways, I'll have to cut and cut and cut. But getting the story out, start to finish, is a big deal for many writers. I work well under pressure, I suppose. It just took a few 1-3 week deadlines to make me get moving: Halloween planning, Wedding planning, dress making, NaNoWriMo, a head cold, sore throat, bleary eyes, new contact lenses, laundry, dishes, company coming, and a half-dozen other things. And instead of doing all the things above, I procrastinated today and finished the novel. :D I mean, I prioritized the completion of the novel so I could focus on those other things. Yeah. That's what I meant.

So, when I'm sick and I wake up two hours before my alarm goes off, I finish novels. Good to know!

Sighing in relief now!

Cuddles,

Tamara

WORD COUNT BENCHMARK

WORD COUNT: 40,264

I finally reached the 40K mark, with a whole lot of busy times when I just didn't write, to a whole lot of times when I could but didn't have all the points clicking, to now when I just got mad and did it. With various distractions this day, most of which I ignored and some with which I will deal in a moment, I'm glad I finally dragged the carcass of my book over the speed bump into full action and adventure from here on out. I'm projecting at least 50K pages, but maybe more, depending, since I'd rather ramble and cut than come up short with content and have to write whole passages during editing.

Phase Two Countdown Reset: 31!

Yeah... I got none of my art/writing goals by today. Tomorrow is more promising, as apparently all things that "need to be done" crop up when I've started a new plan with a deadline.

Things I Did Instead, in no particular order:

1. Cleaned my bedroom.
2. Cut and filed both dogs toenails.
3. Gave Scotty a trim...
4. Gapped Scotty's forehead hair.
5. Apologized to Scotty by cuddling him.
6. Felt suspicious over someone else "breaking down" in front of Ryan's.
7. Cleaned the litter box.
8. Turned off my Rise and Shine alarm.
9. Finished an anime series' last two episodes with Brandon.
10. "Garbaged" the house.
11. Gathered art supplies, intending to draw comics pages. Didn't.
12. Spent 15 minutes figuring out what had happened in my novel and where I was going with it.
13. Answered the phone, effectively crushing that line of creative thought.
14. Resisted the urge to piece a quilt instead.
15. And... Resisted the urge to target practice with a shotgun.

That about sums it up, and this list is just from today. Other than replacing the drainage plumbing in the house yesterday, what did I do? :) No worries. I'll work some tonight and more tomorrow. I just want to be honest with my few readers... This kind of endeavor is mostly disappointment and frustration until publication! It's also a flexible, yet hectic process. A lot gets done on one day, and nothing the next. Something about life, something about time, something about loving good company.

So, tomorrow will now be day 30. Why? Because my sanity demands it.