At the start of 2012, I did a post about My Goals for 2012.
Before I do the same for 2013, I wanted to look at how I did last year.
Make Better Use of My Time
Well, I don’t think I did very well with this. I got some
projects done, but I didn’t get as much done as I could have. I have an excuse
for the first couple of months: I slipped on some ice and cracked a bone in my
arm and a rib. That slowed me down for a while.
I said I would set deadlines, but didn’t. I did shift my
focus from short quick projects to longer projects. I got several started, but
some of them are not finished yet, so I look less productive than I was.
I read more this year. Forty-four books in total. That took
up my time, but Pierre Berton’s advice is “read, read, read, write, write,
write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite”, so it wasn’t time wasted.
I completed Contingency and got it into the Hundred Dollar
Film Festival. It won the best of Alberta award. That was very gratifying.
I wasn’t happy with the version I finished earlier in the year,
so I pulled it out of the Hundred Dollar Film Festival. I reshot it later in
the year. The new version was much better, so, if it gets accepted, it will be
ready for next years festival.
I set a deadline of April 1 for this project. I didn’t do
anything on in 2012. Next year. For sure. Really. I mean it this time.
I planned to use Xtranormal
to turn the short story into a film. I never started on it, but I did use
Xtranormal to make Make
’ em Squirm: The Sharkbiter Way. I found that a valuable step toward a
longer project.
Transportation Planning Story (Novelette)
I wanted to write a novelette based on one or another of my
transportation stories. I made some more notes about ideas and developed the
story a bit, but didn’t get to any actual writing.
I did start three stories I hope will develop into
novelettes. I based Bright
Freedom on one of the feature scripts I wrote in 2011. I got a first
draft done, which was mostly a direct conversion of the script into prose form.
I cut out some material and added some as well. I restructured it a bit. I left
it for a while to work on other projects before I did a second draft. It is
still on hold. The first draft came in at 17,400 words.
I worked on two other novelettes. Both were science fiction
stories. Felix is about an expedition
to Mars to search for a lost robot rover. The idea came from an H. P. Lovecraft
story. I have about half of the first draft done. It looks like done the first
draft will be less than 8,000 words.
Heat Wave is the
story of a scientist who runs into resistance to his research. I met a
researcher several years ago who told me about their experiences, which gave me
the idea for the story. The story also incorporates some of my own experiences.
It looks like it will end up about 10,000 words.
I did some research into the market for science fiction
stories. It looks like there are quite a large number of magazines that publish
science fiction. Some don’t pay very much.
One magazine has a long list of clichéd stories they won’t
publish. Unfortunately, Heat Wave is
similar to one they list. I could fix that with a different ending, but the
ending was the point of the story. I plan to finish the story the way I
planned, and then see how people react to it.
I wrote a shorter science fiction story, Pete’s Plan, which I submitted to a
couple of the magazines. Both rejected it, but there are many more to try yet.
I rewrote it after the first rejection, and I plan another rewrite before I
resubmit it to another magazine.
The Unexpected
Several of my projects this year were not planned. That
included Make
’ em Squirm: The Sharkbiter Way, as well as the short stories and
novelettes I worked on.
Blog
My 2012 goal was to post at least one blog post a week. I
did 58 posts. I did miss a couple weeks because of my accident. I didn’t had as
many visits to my blog in 2012, but that may be partly due to changes in the
way visits were counted.
My Goals for 2012
Next week, after New Years Day, I’ll do a new set of goals
for 2013.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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