Oh, look – the end of November!

The end of November, when I usually wrap up my writing year, and take stock of it. This year… well, this year things might be a wee bit different – but I’ll get there.

First, the writing year – the good and the bad of it…

The bad first: there are three items in my To Write List, a novel and two plays, that I truly want to write, and keep moving from year to year, because I never get to work on them. Now and then I’ll begin to work on one or the other, and then… And while one rather terrifies me, I do want to write them all. Only there are always reasons, and hindrances, and, to be quite frank, procrastination. I really thought this would be the year – for one of the plays, at least – but here we are at the end of November, and no, it’s not to be.

On the other hand…

Remember the Twelve Stories? Well, I’ve written eleven of them so far: I’m on schedule, and I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve tried several things – from contemporary to historical fantasy,and a few things in between… I haven’t sent them all around yet – and in fact, truly doing something with the stories now that I have written them should go on the Not Done list. Still, I’m rather happy with how it all turned out.

Then I wrote my first ever full feature-length screenplay. So very much feature-length, in fact, that it turned out too long. Awfully long, even after going back and cutting it as ruthlessly as I thought it could be cut without becoming… well, something else. And mind, I rather like it – only I know it’s not going anywhere the size it is. So now I’m beginning to thing that perhaps it must become something else. A screenplay about that particular story (another one I’d wanted to write for ages, incidentally) – but… focusing on someone else? Very likely yes – so there is a good deal more to do with it. Still, the Impossibly Long Screenplay is there, and I’ll count it as a Thing Done.

Theatre-wise… oh, a good deal of it. Three adaptations-cum-translation, all to be staged next year. One, especially, is a huge thing, diverging enough from the original to be in part my own work – and on its way to become a big production for our company: next season’s Big Thing. And there is more to come: Nina asked for a new play… but now, we’ll talk about it in January, when it’s time to plan.

And then there is another thing whose place is still suspended between the In Progress and the Maybe… Let’s just say that a set of unexpected and exciting circumstances had me plotting a novel much faster than usual, and am now beginning to draft the first chapters…

Which brings me to the fact that this year I’m not following my own rules. This year I’m going to have a Writing December. There is the Twelfth Story to write, of course. No, really: I can hardly give up at this point, can I? And there is one more small adaptation – a Christmas thing meant for some hazy future, in theory… only, I want to make it a Christmas surprise for Nina. On the dangers of giving this kind of surprises to slightly tyrannical directors, I’ll let you know. And then there is the Other Thing – the potentially huge other thing that could become a turning point, and is still very much in the air – but…

You see, don’t you? This year – this one writing year, I couldn’t possibly wrap up at the end of November. So, onward: one more writing month, this years. I’ll let you know.