I've tried to do the Jay Lake thing, believe me, but it just doesn't work like that for me. That man can draft faster than I can type. With three fingers, no less.
I can think of a couple of examples where I started a story and didn't finish it, but generally they were writing exercises that I didn't really have any investment in the story. I also have a couple of novel ideas where I wrote an outline or started the research but never even began drafting. In general, though, I don't have any partial stories or novels sitting around on my hard disk. My general practice is to start something and work on it exclusively and fairly regularly until it's done.
When I set goals for myself (I don't have one at the moment, as June is going to be largely taken up with the Taos workshop and I suspect my goals may change after that) it's generally been a combination of "write every day with a minimum of X words per day" (where X has varied from 100 to 1000) and "finish a chapter/story for each crit group meeting" (i.e. every 3 weeks).
When I'm working on a novel I don't do short stories at all, with the exception that I will take a break and write a story if it's an opportunity I can't pass up (e.g. an anthology invitation). Two of the three stories I sold in the past few weeks were invited anthology submissions, one I wrote on a break from my 2nd novel in December and the other I wrote right after completing that novel. The other one was a story I wrote at Clarion in 2000, didn't get around to revising until 2006, and went through 8 rejections over 2 years before finally being accepted.
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Date: 2008-06-05 06:27 pm (UTC)I can think of a couple of examples where I started a story and didn't finish it, but generally they were writing exercises that I didn't really have any investment in the story. I also have a couple of novel ideas where I wrote an outline or started the research but never even began drafting. In general, though, I don't have any partial stories or novels sitting around on my hard disk. My general practice is to start something and work on it exclusively and fairly regularly until it's done.
When I set goals for myself (I don't have one at the moment, as June is going to be largely taken up with the Taos workshop and I suspect my goals may change after that) it's generally been a combination of "write every day with a minimum of X words per day" (where X has varied from 100 to 1000) and "finish a chapter/story for each crit group meeting" (i.e. every 3 weeks).
When I'm working on a novel I don't do short stories at all, with the exception that I will take a break and write a story if it's an opportunity I can't pass up (e.g. an anthology invitation). Two of the three stories I sold in the past few weeks were invited anthology submissions, one I wrote on a break from my 2nd novel in December and the other I wrote right after completing that novel. The other one was a story I wrote at Clarion in 2000, didn't get around to revising until 2006, and went through 8 rejections over 2 years before finally being accepted.
See you at JayCon!