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

NaNoWriMo and THE BIG SCARY THING

I passed the 53K words mark on my "Edit Volume 1 Challenge" of NaNoWriMo. Technically, this means I "win". I blame it on passages in the not-as-horrible-as-I-thought rough draft that I was able to just tweak, copy and paste instead of rewrite in depth. I'm still a good 15K away from calling the story finished, and most of that will be full on retyping, re-envisioning and restructuring. That's no big deal, really. Just work. I already have it drafted, really poorly drafted, but drafted nonetheless!

Upon finishing this second draft, I'll dive into a back-burner drafting of Volume 3, plus a double front-burner drafting of Volume 2 and polish of Volume 1. Y'know... a light work load for me! ;)

WEBSITE NEWS:
The Tamara Henson Studios website is coming along nicely. I've gutted an already gut-light website and taken out all the commission stuff for now. I've streamlined the content so that I still have some art and graphic design portfolios. You can still email me if you want. There's still some aesthetic stuff I need to work out, as well as the store and cart options through Google.

When I'm finished, the site will focus on my Novels and Doll development. My ART section will have my currently-released characters and worlds from my stories. I'm hoping that the Ragdolls of the World (tm) brand and the Myth-Babies (tm) brand will fully launch in the next year for a related reason. I want all my copyrighted content to have a professional-looking, content-heavy home because of the big scary thing I'm doing as soon as I can.

It'll take a bit for my web designer Ryan to make all my updates live. His router gave up the ghost last week and we're a bit behind due to that. Any website design and content feedback you can provide over the next couple weeks will be invaluable and much appreciated! :)

THE BIG SCARY NOVEL THING:

And the big scary thing that I'm doing with the novel: Self-Publishing under Amazon. There will be an eBook and a paperback novel. I'll be doing cover art and design. This may be hard work and a risk, but my book isn't making any money just sitting here either, waiting on the potential graces of the traditional publishing time suck.

God-willing, I'll be publishing volume one VERY SOON!

Cuddles,

Tamara

NaNoWriMo 2011

I'm starting a new NaNoWriMo project today. My goal will be to make a (really) rough draft of Book 3, since I just drafted volume 1, and since volume 2 is already wrapped and ready for a full edit once I finish 1. I already had a loose outline of volume 3, which hasn't changed fundamentally since the new content for volume 1 emerged. I just made a few more notes to go with volume 1 and will be typing it up with the existing chapter one I had already completed. It'll give me the illusion of breaking out of the gate ahead, but I dunno if I'll have time to keep it up all month.

I have decided that with the small exception of wedding prep, a wedding and brief honeymoon, my November will be rather dull. I will be mostly alone all month, with the exception of the wedding week. So this month, I will try to finish the rough draft while simultaneously focusing on editing volume 1. If I spend a short time daily on each, I shouldn't have too much trouble keeping myself on task. I've put comics and illustrations on hold for the very creative purpose of diving into the content for a month. Let's see if I can avoid buckling...

I mean, I can win this NaNoWriMo thing, even if it kills me! Rawr!

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