Back at Writing

After a year of mostly not doing any fiction writing, I decided it's time to get serious about this once again. I distinctly remember sitting in one of the Writing Symposium seminars at GenCon and begrudging the time I have wasted in not pursuing this dream. In fact, the pursuit of being a fantasy writer was one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. It says so right in the upper right-hand corner - "I am a fantasy writer." What do writers do? They write. What do I need to do to become a fantasy writer? I need to write. So that's what I'm doing.

Here's my plan:

1. I reconnected with my high school buddy Phil, and we are working our way through the Season 10 Writing Excuses Master Classes. This season of this popular writing podcast is designed to equip new authors with the tools they need to write successfully. It comes complete with homework, which is a great way to motivate myself to write.
   
2. Every year Brandon Sanderson teaches an undergraduate Creative Writing class at Brigham Young University, and this year a professional videographer is recording his lectures. You can find the playlist here. If there is a better free resource for learning to write genre fiction, I want to know about it.
   
3. From one of these lectures, I learned that to be a professional writer, you need to write approximately 10,000 words a month. So that's the goal I am working to achieve. I am using the WriteTrack tool I blogged about several years ago, slowly ramping up each month in my goal until I am consistently writing 10,000 words a month (counting only my fiction, not any other writing here).
   
4. As I start producing quality pieces, I need to start submitting them to writing contests (like Writer of the Future) and online fantasy fiction magazines. This gives me the opportunity to hone my craft on smaller works before trying to tackle a whole novel.

I don't expect that any of this will interfere with my content for Standard Pauper, so don't worry about that. But it does mean that you can expect to see a few more writing posts from time to time.