Happy New Year!

Happy New Year TKZers!

Welcome to 2018 and whatever new (or used) resolutions you may have made. For me, after a difficult year health wise, I’m ready to face the new year with both resilience and hope, at least where my writing is concerned. I’m not so much into resolutions for 2018 as I am into consolidating what I learned about myself and my writing process last year.

Despite everything, I feel pretty good about what I achieved – especially the fact that my agent now has three new projects to play with/submit:)  As you know from many of my blog posts, I’ve expanded into YA and MG as well as adult historical fiction/mysteries, and while this has meant a lot of time and commitment, learning and angst, I’ve learned a lot about my writing process as well as my resolve.

In 2018, I plan to continue to apply what I’ve learned and try to be a little more forgiving as far as my writing process is concerned (no more NaNoWriMo regrets for me!). Although I have delved a little bit into social media, I realise that my presence is a little erratic and unfocused so another goal of mine is to reconsider how I approach online and social media – but not to the detriment of my writing (which continues to remain the focus of course!). I also feel that, in the spirit of expanding my writing horizons, I should begin to embrace what I call the ‘difficult’ projects…those ideas/proposals I have avoided so far out of fear that they are too ‘difficult’ to successfully pull off. You know the ones – they continue to buzz about in your brain, demanding to be told, but that little voice inside (the one that hates failure) keeps telling you to wait…keeps telling you your not good enough to write it… Well, I think it’s time to embrace the difficult – be bold  as well as brave – and tackle at least one of these projects this year.

So TKZers what do you plan on focusing on in 2018. What did you learn in 2017 that you can consolidate and use in the coming year as far as your writing is concerned?

 

Happy 2016 from TKZ

Happy New Year and welcome back to The Kill Zone blog for 2016!

Each year many of start of with resolutions and many of us end the year having not quite managed to fulfill any or all of them. For me, I managed to achieve about a third of what I planned for 2015 so this year I’ve decided that, at least in terms of my writing, I’m going to focus on just a few key aspects (okay…make those tics) that drive me and my beta readers to distraction. Thus, my three main ‘writing’ new year’s resolutions are:

  1. Not to have another character with a surname that ends in ‘s’. How many times have I told myself this – thousands upon thousands – and what did I just do with my latest WIP?  I had a character whose last name was…Brooks…argh!
  2. To start introducing nicer weather. My poor characters are constantly beset by fog, rain and damp. I know my family are English and that is pretty much typical weather but still, would it kill me to let a character enjoy some sunshine now and again??
  3. To (finally) kick the critic off my shoulder and stop her from plaguing me with self doubt when I’ve not even finished the first draft. Time to finally relax, have some fun in 2016 and wait at least until the first draft is complete to let that editor/critic/angst- ridden voice into my head…

So what are your ‘writing resolutions’ for 2016? What are you going to focus on this year?