what goes first?

It's nearly the end of October. It's been in the sixties and seventies here, warm and humid, rainy. The warm damp breezes feel good sometimes, but sometimes sitting at my computer in the evenings it's just stuffy. (Or, um, maybe that's the fault of my roommate and me making pots of tea in this weather. Though can you blame us? October and tea go together so well.)

The end of October means some other things, too, though. Halloween, of course, but entirely apart from that--I have to re-evaluate my goals as far as writing goes.

I've been proud of myself, this semester, for keeping work going on A Returning Power. Ten thousand words? It seems staggering progress.

That isn't the only work I've done, either. Over fall break I did that timeline for The Urban Fantasy Novel; today I started a proper outline (well, sort of). (Notecards and markers and masking tape and a wall and four colors of thread; you do the math.)

But at the end of the summer my goal had been a full re-draft of A Returning Power by the end of October (not happening), and at least a partial revision of The Urban Fantasy Novel by the end of November.

I'm not really disappointed in myself for my slow steps on A Returning Power. I've been busy, and I have been working on it; it makes sense to take the time it needs. I know that when I have the time to work on it, I will get it done.

What the problem is, is that I'd told the Codex Novel Contest group that I'd turn in the first 50-75 pages of The Urban Fantasy Novel in early December. Other people will read them, other people will ponder them and tell me what they think of them. I really wanted, I really want, to have the beginning at least slightly more in shape than it is right now.

...and, if I do that, if I even can manage even that on my schedule (because fixing the beginning means knowing a lot more about the novel overall than I do right now), I definitely won't have time or space in my brain for A Returning Power.

So I have to choose. True, on the surface it looks easy. People will see The Urban Fantasy Novel rather soon, and I don't even have a self-imposed deadline on A Returning Power (having tipped over the October re-draft goalpost already). But I have something else on A Returning Power, which is a self-imposed determination to Keep Working On It; and they both have equal claim on my heart.

(It doesn't help that, being in the Middles of A Returning Power, I am slightly convinced that if I lose my momentum now on that project it'll take me a long time to pick it back up again. Also, I am closer to a reasonably presentable draft of A Returning Power, and the lure of that is hard to step away from.)

... yeah. Maybe what I really need to do is resign myself to the fate of turning in a not-so-great set of pages of The Urban Fantasy Novel in December, because I have a bunch of reasons for keeping work going, at least minorly, on A Returning Power. I still don't love that, but maybe it makes the most sense when considered as a whole. (Lately I haven't been paying much attention to external deadlines--the difference here, I think, is that I chose it in the first place. Now, though, trying to push through to what I had hoped to get done just doesn't seem to make sense.)

Or maybe what I really need is to go to bed, and get up in the morning and finish my takehome midterm and go to my last ballroom dance class. How about I try that first, and then see what happens from there.