by Paulette Jaxton

With the end of FLRT on the horizon and my novel writing seemingly back on track, I thought it about time to set out some goals for the year to come.
 
First and foremost is finishing the first draft of The Empress Sword. Recently I joined a Twitter tag group that’s writing 1K Per Day (#1kday). It was only supposed to be through the end of February, but several of the writers are going to carry it on through March as well. So far I’ve been doing very well keeping up with them. If I manage to keep up this pace I should actually have the first draft completed by the end of the month. (Holy cow, that sounds amazing and scary all at the same time!)
 
Once the first draft is complete I’m going to step away from Empress Sword for about a month to give the Alpha readers a chance to finish giving me their feedback. During that month I want to do some world building and to that end, as a reward for finishing the first draft, I’m going to buy myself a nice map drawing program. I’ll use it to build a much needed map for Empress Sword as well as begin the world building for my next novel Priestess of the Flame, based on my short story Divine Fire.
 
That brings me up to about the beginning of May when I will start the rewrite of Empress Sword. I’ve never tackled a rewrite this large before, so I’m allowing myself a couple of months to get that done. Then I’ll open up the wiki to some Beta readers. I guess at that point I’ll be ready to send it out to some agents as well.
 
I know an agent hunt can be a very long process and that ultimately it probably won’t lead to anything, so starting sometime in this fall I plan to submit Empress Sword to podiobooks.com as a complete finished reading. Then I want to podcast the novel complete with guest voices, music and plenty of author chat. You’ll be able to get the whole podiobook right away or listen to the biweekly podcast if you want the whole experience.
 
Once I get the podcast started up and finish the world-building on Priestess of the Flame, I’ll start writing again. I’ll be sure to let you know how it’s going, right here in the blog. So that is my plan for 2009. Wish me luck, I’m probably going to need it!