"I'm going to be productive today"

Who else is guilty of that? I'm trying to be more productive with my writing by giving myself goals and deadlines. For instance, I'll try to write so many words in a day, or tell myself I have one week to finish a chapter. We'll see how it goes! 

A new project

September, the start of the school year, of the university year. The ideal time to make new projects for the coming months. 

During the summer holidays, I made much progress on the first draft of the sequel of As Winter Came and Went. I have actually started to write what will be the last chapter. Once this is finished, it will be time for the first round of edits, the most important one: some scenes will have to be cut, others lengthened. Because the manuscript was written over a period of months (years? I’ll have to calculate), some aspects of the stories evolved and parts of the first chapter will have to be changed accordingly. 

My goal is to finish this first draft by December 2019, and edit, proofread and make ready for publication over 2020. However, it is not my only project. There’s Cinnamon, as you already know, but I haven’t made any progress on it during the summer. For now it’s at a standby. I’ll finish it, eventually, but for now I’m concentrating on other projects. 

One is completely new. Well, it stems from an idea I had some time ago. One of the characters from As Winter Came and Went is Summer, a Barb horse imported from Morocco. I love this character. I love writing about him. And readers seem to love him too. So I decided he deserved to be the hero of his own story, a story spanning from his birth, around 1815, to his first appearance in As Winter Came and Went. A prequel of sorts. 

It will not be very long, only a novella. I’ve made an outline, and it will have six, probably relatively short, chapters. It will be possible to read it independently from As Winter Came and Went, but it will give readers of my novel the opportunity to learn more about Summer. I also intend to lavishly illustrate this novella (which will be self-published as well). 

I’m really excited about this project and am, at the moment I’m writing this, a bit over 1000 words into the first chapter. It’s not a lot, but it’s a beginning. Who knows, maybe it will be published sooner than I expect!

"Where are they all gone?"

A new cartoon! Hooray! Not really true this time, because all my ideas have not escaped while I was trying to write them down: I've been unusually productive lately and am really motivated. I haven't forgotten the book of cartoons I intend to publish. But I'm still trying to decide how to organise it... But I will probably make an announcement about it soon enough!