My Goals for August. Really.

I didn't do very well in July. Two weeks of writer's block took care of that. Derailed last month, I'm determined to recover from it and do something this month. So here's my story goals for this month:

1. Finish Part 1 of Bad Company.
2. Replot Spanner and write the second draft of the script.
3. Finish my self-instruction in how to draw the head. I'm currently procrastinating working on the most difficult perspectives: the extreme angles and tilted profiles.
4. Start creating character designs again. Since the Spanner and BadCo casts overlap, some designs will do double duty.
5. Learn how to write song lyrics (surprisingly tough!) so I can start writing my 50 songs.

>First, Bad Company. I decided not to do AugNoWriMo because my goal this month doesn't involve word counts. It doesn't concern me one bit if I write more or less than 50,000 words, because my goal is to finish Part 1, "Love Terrorists", from the title of the prologue ("Intro: Meet Dictel") to the final word of the section. To achieve my goal this month, I have to complete all of Part 1, which may or may not be about 50,000 words long.

About Spanner: I've been procrastinating trying to think up ways to improve my script. I realize there's a few ways not just to improve the story, but to make it conform better to the original story plan (or at least the version I settled on by 2005). First of all, I originally began the story in August 2014, the month before Shira's 15th birthday, rather than the previous April, not long after Jennifer's 15th. However, some of my ideas for the early events in the story (including #1) remain vague. I usually think of the Spanner story in terms of narrative landmarks: Shira/Spanner's destruction of the huge screen at the protest crackdown, the "rattlesnake flag" incident at a government-sponsored rally, Leila trying to jump off the Warren Avenue Bridge only to get rescued by Shira, etc. But what happens in between these Spectacular Events, and how do I lead up to them? That's where the challenge lies. Am I up to it? Sure I am. But I need to write the in-between scenes well enough if I want to keep it from degenerating into mere filler between the set pieces.

Since Spanner is supposed to be a manga, and since I plan to adapt Bad Company into comics form (I'm billing the original novel as "A Novelization"), I need to draw my characters. And that means not just doing the designs, but putting the characters into action and designing their clothes and such. Since I'm discarding reams of old printed webpages for the "30-Day Declutter Challenge" I'm taking part in, I'm going to use a lot of that for drawing practice. And I know just how much practice I need — which is a whole hell of a lot, since I've been, well, procrastinating it for months.

Last but not least, I need to figure out exactly how to write song lyrics. I haven't written any songs yet because the words staunchly refuse to materialize. The rhymes I've come up with so far are inane, so I rip up the paper I've been writing on or simply don't write at all. Once I learn how to write song lyrics — and this may require me to take a little self-instruction course in writing poetry as well — writing the actual songs will be a snap (even if I have to consult chord charts and plink on my mother's piano).

So these are my major goals for August. I have some personal goals as well (such as cleaning up my apartment), but I won't bother to get into them.

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