Meredith Mansfield, Author

Well, it’s time to assess how last year went, at least as far as my writing goals are concerned.

First Goal: Publish BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING. This means:

• Finish the first draft.
• Figure out how many books there actually are in this series and where the break points are.
• Let it rest for about a month.
• Run through a couple of revisions.
• Get it critiqued.
• Another round of revisions.
• Polishing edit.
• Format for publication.

Well, I did finish the first draft. And I think there are two books in the series, plus the prequel novella. But now I’m concerned about the length of the second book. And that’s as far as I’ve gotten on that goal. My best guess right now is that I’ll have BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING ready for publication in May 2018.

This story fought me. Overall, long-term, that’s a good thing. I will have learned things from this one that will make me a better writer. Short-term it’s . . . not so good.

Second Goal: Get restarted on the rewrite of MAGE STORM. (No cover, yet, though I have a couple of ideas.)

Eh, I’ve done a little, some of which will have to be redone. But basically this story has languished in 2017.

Third Goal: This one was about all the other stories that I want to get to eventually.

• MAGIC AND POWER: Another story in the same world as DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, but centering on another set of protagonists. (MAGIC AND POWER might end up being the series title.)
• A couple of fairy-tale retellings buzzing around the back of my mind. One of them might end up in the MAGIC AND POWER world.
• My weird Oz story is always out there. I actually wrote about ten chapters of it some time ago, but it wasn’t working. Partly because I’d left my protagonist completely alone for too long. I need to figure out how to give her an unhelpful, but talkative sidekick that will fit in this more dangerous version of Oz.
• The prequels to the DUAL MAGICS series, though I don’t think I’m quite ready to go back to that world yet.
• Someday, I’m going to have to go back and write the third book in the Chimeria series. That is a fun world to play in.

The only thing that’s happened on any of these has been me occasionally opening the ideas file and jotting down a few notes on new ideas.

Fourth Goal: Get better at marketing. The only way that’s going to happen is if I make a plan and devote some attention to it at least every month, not just around book launches. It’s just not nearly as much fun as writing. But it has to be done.

Yeah. Don’t make me laugh.

A couple of  things that weren’t on my list of goals last year, but that did get done (at least partly):

• Taking my books from Amazon Select (and Amazon exclusivity) and distribute them wide. I accomplished this, but some of it is going to have to be redone in the new year because Pronoun (the distributor I used for most of my books) is closing in mid-January.
• Amazon’s x-ray feature, which, theoretically allows you to highlight a word or phrase in the book and get a definition. Cool idea for fantasy. But it means I have to actually enter all those definitions. I’ve enabled it for the individual books in the Dual Magics series, but I haven’t gotten any farther.

Here’s to a better–and more productive–2018.

I have already written the first chapter or so of BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM.