Patrick J. Heck

I set ambitious writing-related goals for April, and I’ve already failed one. Any guesses which?

• Reach 30k in my current WIP (I’m at 7k)
• Do my last round of edits for Everwinter
• Finish my two comp reads
• Finish my edit letter for my CP
• Write a blog post a week

Trick question. I failed two. If you look at the date of this post, and then check my last post, you’ll see I missed a week. I don’t have an excuse beyond being tired.

The other goal I failed is the first one. I hear you, it’s only April 14th. I could write 23k in two weeks. Last November, I did 112k in four weeks. 23k is super doable. Except, I don’t want to.

Back in March, I entered RevPit and knew it’d be a one month wait for results. I told myself to use that month to focus on BONE TO BONE, my medieval fantasy about a necromantic priest working to clear his name alongside a cagey nobleman. On top of that I would also focus on some house projects I’ve been putting aside.

What ended up happening? The month went by in a blur. I wrote some of BONE TO BONE, getting to around 7k before planning the rest of it. Then… nothing.

Not nothing-nothing. I still worked on house projects. But no bones, because every time I sat down to write, I wanted to dive back into THE EVERWINTER KING (which I just call Everwinter usually) instead. The moment I sent it off to the RevPit editors, a thousand edit ideas popped into my head.

Thankfully I jotted them all down. I have three pages of notes to myself to work through. Some are quick fixes. Others mean rewriting full chapters. I’m excited!

Though I wasn’t selected for RevPit, the time away from Everwinter did me a world of good. It was a built in month I wasn’t allowed to touch the book, only think about it. The edits are a little dramatic, but I hope the make the book better, and more enjoyable to a wider audience of people.

And I hope an agent likes them. Wink.

The goal is to finish my edits by early May, then toss the book to my next round of betas. Depending on how quickly they read, I could still be querying by end of May, which is my current plan. But the world won’t end if I push till June.

Except, I did swear in June last year that I would be querying within a year…

Let’s take a look at that list again.

• Reach 30k in my current WIP (I’m at 7k) [sorry bones]
• Do my last round of edits for Everwinter [in progress]
• Finish my two comp reads [in progress]
• Finish my edit letter for my CP [done!]
• Write a blog post a week [well… you know]

This would be a great segue into my writing process for Everwinter, but I’ll save that for another post. Instead, I’ll leave you with a few WIP ideas that have bounced into my head over the last week, plus a recent book haul.

• A time traveling romance about a time traveler stranded in the regency period.
• A historical fantasy set in the American Revolution, with lite magic.
• A sci-fi about ozone mining. This isn’t a new idea to be honest, but the recent Artemis II mission re-inspired an old idea of mine.
• A fantasy about a royal family that hides their even-numbered children. Why? I dunno. We’ll get there.