What will I write this year?

I have been doing fairly well lately making progress on writing projects. My most recent new piece, "Mrs. Hudson Investigates," for PMRP's Summer Mystery Theater this year, has been drafted and has now been passed on to Jeremy for thoughts. I have put it aside for the moment, awaiting our meeting for his feedback. Once I hear what he thinks, I'll attack revisions on that, but I don't want to attempt any before having that to take into account. However I do feel pretty good about the script generally, so I'm confident that I won't find editing too difficult to handle.

I will be working on the next Mrs. Hawking play later this year. I'm always kind of scribbling at it, brainstorming how to combine the various elements I want to have in it. However, I'm trying to delay serious work on it for a few months. The Hawking plays are of course incredibly important to me, but they have a tendency to suck up every moment and every drop of creative energy if I let them. I'd like to balance working on them with other projects. I tend to complete two major writing projects and maybe also one minor one per year, depending on how much else I've got going on. If "Mrs. Hudson" is the minor one (it's not very long) and part 6 is definitely one of the major, I would like to make sure I get in something a little different as well.

As it happens, I am also working on another major project right now, which I've alluded to here before, but I'm still not ready to talk about it. Mostly because I'm finding it incredibly difficult and I don't like how it's currently turning out. I know I need to trust and commit to the drafting process if I ever have any hope of it being good. But because I feel so unsatisfied in it I'm reluctant to discuss it yet. I've made a fair bit of progress on it— it's a large work and I estimate the first draft is at least seventy-five percent complete —so I'm definitely committed to finishing it, but it's a very new and different beast for me. I don't like the feeling of flying blind, and it shakes my confidence in my abilities. I'll likely talk about it at some point, but I don't know when. Maybe when I finally get a complete first draft.

While that piece is a priority, it's coming very slowly and with great difficulty. So I'd kind of like to have something else going in parallel. I will likely finish the first draft of the major new project this year, but I have no freaking clue how long it will take to revise— it really does feel pretty bad right now. But it's always tricky to decide what else to work on. I've got a bunch of new ideas— or, old ideas I've yet to actually commit to paper —but I don't know what would serve my turn here and be best worth the time and effort.

I think I will muse on those possibilities in another entry.