Mr. Summerhaye's Horse

Yes, Mr. Summerhaye's Horse will be the title of the novella about Summer, Dennys's horse in As Winter Came and Went. 

I have finished the first draft of this novella, which is at the moment 40,000 words (so it's a long novella, since a story is considered a novel when it's over 50,000 words). It still needs a lot of editing, but I'm hoping to self-publish it this year. 

If you are new to this blog, or have missed some previous posts and have not read As Winter Came and Went, Summer is a Barb (an ancient North African breed) horse who was imported from Morocco to England to become a racehorse. The novella will span the years 1815 to 1820, ending when we first meet Summer in As Winter Came and Went. 

I'm planning to illustrate the novella, so I'll have to work on several drawings. Pictured above is a preparatory sketch for one of the illustrations. 

This is a project I'm really excited about and I'll probably make more posts about it, my progress and the story and research that went into it! 

Writing goals

First of all, happy new year to all of you! How 2019 has flown... I hope it was a good year for you and that 2020 will be even better. 

One year ago, I made a post about my writing resolutions for 2019. I have just looked back at it, to see if I had actually kept them. 

My first resolution was about finishing the first draft of the sequel of As Winter Came and Went, before the summer. Though I did finish it, it was in the autumn. 

My second resolution was about my novel in progress called Cinnamon: I wanted to write at least half of the first draft. Though I still intend to complete Cinnamon one day, I am not working on it for now, because I have decided to focus on other manuscripts. 

My third resolution related to two non-fiction projects. One of them was the book of cartoons, which is done and published. The other has been abandoned for the moment. 

My fourth resolution was to engage more with the Internet writing community, but I’ve been rather lazy about that. 

My fifth resolution was to write short stories and publish them here. I have written one short story and am still wondering what I’m going to do with it. 

A good part of those resolutions were not kept. But that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, the most interesting, the most exciting projects are those that were not planned. I think that my best writing achievement for 2019 was my spur of the moment NaNoWriMo participation which allowed me to write, from scratch, the first draft of The Orchid Collector. In a handful of weeks, a vague idea I had in the backburner was turned into a completed (if not very good) first draft. 

Another unplanned project was the novella about Summerhaye, Dennys’s horse in As Winter Came and Went. I’m currently writing chapter 6 out of 7, so I’m hoping to self-publish it in 2020. 

This is my first writing resolution for 2020: to finish, illustrate and publish this novella. 

My second is to thoroughly edit The Orchid Collector and find an agent to represent it. 

The third is to finish editing the sequel of As Winter Came and Went and get it as close to publication as I can. 

The fourth is to learn about marketing and try to sell more copies of As Winter Came and Went. 

The fifth is to write short stories. 

The sixth is to unearth one of my unfinished manuscripts (maybe Cinnamon, maybe another) and actually complete it. 

The seventh is to read more fiction, and maybe to post reviews on this blog. 

And I’ll end this post like I did last year’s… 

The end of the year is like the end of a book. There is no way of knowing what will happen next. But you can write parts of the story, of the story that comes next, the one you want to read, the one you want to live.