The Best Christmas Present Ever

Okay, so on to the exciting news!

My boyfriend did a truly amazing thing for Christmas this year. He conspired with members of our families and managed to win me one of the auctions that Worldbuilders does every year for, get this, a manuscript critique from a published author.

At first, I was in shock. Then I cried. The boy caught it on video and put it on Facebook.

So I've been hard at work trying to edit my monster of a first manuscript in order to take advantage of this amazing gift. I am insanely excited for this opportunity. It should be invaluable.

Not sure how he's ever going to top this present for me though....

Grave of the Goddess

Hello, all.

Remember that young adult fantasy novel I worked so hard to finish this spring? Well, I'm finally editing it. I'm using something called the "One-Pass Manuscript Revision" as detailed by Holly Lisle, and so far it's going extremely well. I have a lot of work to do, but I'm confident I can finish this thing to be ready for querying by the end of the summer.

Here is my recently reworked back cover blurb:

Luca has trained with the Northern Sun Sages for as long as he can remember. Soon he hopes to become a full member of the order and pledge his life to the service of the ancient and eternal Sun God.

Kai is the oldest of seven siblings. Living on the edge of the Sun Sages' lands working a failing farm, every day is a struggle to survive. Kai does what she can to help her family, but she feels like the only one to notice that summer is wearing out its welcome.

When the devout Brother Martin comes from the capital to train Luca and his mysterious new powers, Luca's master reveals to the boy that his destiny is much different from that of the sage he hoped to become. On the run from this new destiny, Luca's world collides with Kai's - and she is not happy to meet him.

After a shared vision of a woman bound and calling to them for help, Luca and Kai set out on a journey of discovery together. But their ultimate goal is a grave... The grave of the Moon Goddess.

What do you think? Intrigued yet?

Life Update: May-June Edition

Usually when I am remiss in posting to this blog it's because I don't think anything interesting is happening in my life.

That is definitely not the case this time.

I haven't been writing much since I finished Grave of the Goddess so maybe that fact alone is why I haven't been keeping up with my blog. But I've also been extraordinarily busy trying to keep up with all of the crazy things suddenly going on in my life.

Just after finishing Grave, I went to stay with my BFF for a few days in Boston. (Psst, the Quilt exhibit at the MFA right now is stellar.) I drove her back to my house and our other BFF from college came up from FL with her boyfriend to visit for a long weekend. We all took a trip to see said college (and town) for a day. Oh happy nostalgia. When she had to leave, I took BFF back to Boston and then came home ready to buckle down on the job hunt before diving into editing Grave.

Yeah right. You know what they say about best laid plans and all that... I spent a WEEK trying to fix unexpected car trouble. And then I found out that my grandparents are trying to sell their house this summer. So now I'm in New Hampshire with them, my dad, and my aunt helping them arrange a gigantic yard sale and generally get ready to move.

I haven't had much time to think, let alone write. We are all also trying to rally around another relative who is struggling with depression. ....and then to top everything off, my boy just found out that he probably won't have a job in the fall.

So... yay. Life.

Apologies

Going on hiatus while college friends are in town. Should resume regular posting in a week or so.

Brief update on my writing before I go...

I finished the first draft of Grave of the Goddess last Tuesday. (A million hip hip hoorays because it's only the second full draft of something I've ever finished!) I'm not looking at it for the rest of the month while my beta readers tear it apart. Planning to edit it into a query-worthy draft during June and July. Wish me luck because this will be the first time I have attempted to edit an entire draft like this.

That's it for now. See you next week sometime!

May Is For Pressing Onward

I pretty much already stated by Write Motivation goals for May in my last post, but I figured I'd do something a little more official. Because, you know, I can.

Writing Goals for May

1. Finish rough draft of Grave of the Goddess
2. Take an honest break from writing Grave after sending it to beta readers
3. Write enough of Holyoak Five that I can start a queue for posting episodes every week
4. After at least a week's break, start revisions of Grave

I think all of that's pretty doable. I just hope I'm done with this rough draft in less than two weeks. My five year college reunion is coming up (I know, don't even talk to me) and one of my best friends in the world is coming to visit! I haven't seen her in... jeez... more than two years? We plan to have a personal reunion with my other best friend forever who is finishing up her first year of grad school as we speak.

I'm so excited!

And all of that aside, I'm also trying to press onward with the overhaul of our yard. Since we moved into the house at the end of last summer, we didn't do much in the way of yard work other than mowing the lawn a couple of time and trimming some of the more gregarious growth on the weeping cherry tree out front. Now every chance I get I'm out there with a rake and clippers, attacking the layers of dead leaves and tangled remnants of whatever someone planted years ago. There were tenants living in this house for a couple of years and I'm pretty positive they did ZERO yard work. I keep finding the strangest bits of plastic and trash in the strangest places... I shudder to think what I'll find when it gets really warm and I attack cleaning the basement.

One more thing before I go. I recently noticed that this little blog of mine turned five about a week and a half ago. I've been pretty terrible about posting here regularly up until this year, but I thought it was interesting that I started this my last semester of college and almost all of my posts have been about writing and reading and trying like hell to mesh my everyday life with love of those activities. There are some fun things in my archives.

That's all from me for now. I'm gonna go read up on other people's goals for the month and hope there are still some crazies like me trying to finish the ends of novels.

April Is For Winning!

Behold! My first Camp NaNoWriMo win!

I'm pretty proud of myself this month. Not only because I set myself a reasonable word count goal and met it, but because I took the opportunity to truly commit myself to writing. I have done little else for the past three weeks other than writing. (And cooking and cleaning - sort of.)

I also finished reading TEN books. Granted, two of them were comic strip collections, but still. It was a lot of reading.

Grave of the Goddess is officially over 100,000 words now. I am so very close to finishing it. My poor, bedraggled main characters have reached their final destination at last. Unfortunately, they're both about to experience a load of heartbreak, but that's how it goes. I am hoping with everything I know how to hope with that I will be finished with this draft in another 10k words. And then I can hand it over to my beta readers and relax with writing Holyoak Five while they tear Grave to pieces for me.

That was my month. Not much else happened to me. I've been pretty isolated what with not using Tumblr or Facebook. (That's right! I stayed true to my drastic goals and haven't used those at all.) But it's a productive kind of isolation. And it's such a relief to have the end of this draft in sight that I don't mind not having achieved much of anything else this month...


For the curious, here are the books I read this month broken into genres.

Young Adult (mostly fantasy):
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Rebel Angels by Libba Bray
The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray
The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson

Middle Grade :
The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Non-fiction:
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Horror:
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Girl Who Love Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Comics:
The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
The Best of Foxtrot by Bill Amend



Bring on May! I'm ready for it.

April Write Motivation Goals

Hey, look at that. It's April 14th and I've haven't posted a thing about my goals for this month. Whoops!

My goals:

1. Do Camp NaNoWriMo with a word count goal of at least 27k for the month.
2. Finish rough draft of my WIP novel.
3. Keep posting weekly episodes of Holyoak Five.
4. Replace playing video games with reading books.

So the general plan for this month is to skyrocket into writing bliss based on all the good habits I started (fairly successfully) last month.

Progress so far:

Camp NaNoWriMo: Started out slow. Going much better after Saturday's Writeathon where I wrote 3k words. I'm currently sitting at just under 9k words for the month... Which is fine, it's all right, I can't complain. (Who am I going to complain to anyway? My boyfriend knows the drill by know. He just rolls his eyes and says, "Write, bitch!" Oh, I love him.) But I felt like the 27k goal was a minimum and am a teensy bit mad at myself for not being ahead of the curve.

Finish rough draft of Grave of the Goddess: My frustration with this as been at astronomical levels. I keep plugging away at it, but there's still so much left. In that vein, I have made some pretty drastic amendments to my daily schedule. I've got a list of about six "approved" activities I can participate in, and writing is number one. This has been going on since last Wednesday, and so far I've finished reading four books and written thousands of words. So... you know... I think it's going well!

Keep posting weekly episode of Holyoak Five: Falling behind. I'm about to go make an author's note post explaining that episodes might have to be biweekly now until I'm done with Grave. (I'm still writing it every day, but my concentration has definitely shifted to Grave.)

Replace video games with books: WOO! Totally, wildly successful. I'm catching up on my GoodReads challenge with a vengeance. Of course, it helps that I've cut out all tv/Netflix binging as well. (Other than Red Sox games, Game of Thrones, and the occasional Nature documentary in bed with the boy.)

So that's me so far this month. I have high hopes for finishing Grave soon at which point it goes out to beta reading, I start rewriting, and a lot of tears fall into every meal I consume for the next few months. You know how it goes.

#WriterLife TAG by @KelsNotChels

My new favorite YouTuber @KelsNotChels posted a video last week starting a #WriterLife tag. Well, I am not a YouTuber (a lot of effort and ego that I do not possess) but I loved all of the questions! As a blogger, I figured why not just answer them here?

1. Write Fuel: What do you eat/drink while writing?

- Relatively recently I started drinking coffee in the morning and found that caffeine (like alcohol) is a double-edged sword for my writing. The right amount and I can produce words like Michael Crichton. Too much and I am so useless I might as well be a monkey with a typewriter. Usually I just drink a lot of tea when I'm writing. Black tea, white tea, herbal tea, I have it all. And I find snacking next to impossible - which might be a good thing.

2. Write Sounds: What do you listen to while writing?

- If I want to get in the Zone I turn on Coffitivity and an 8tracks playlist or a Pandora station specifically crafted for writing ambiance. And then I put my super awesome Bose headphones on and it's like my muse is whispering in my ears.

3. Write Vice: What's your most debilitating distraction?

- Tumblr, no contest. Sometimes I go there to put up a short gif reaction post about my WIP and TWO HOURS LATER emerge with a queue that's three days long.

4. Write Horror: What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you while writing?

- Suddenly realizing that the pain in my left wrist has caught fire and I've ignited my tendinitis again.

5. Write Joy: What's the best thing that's ever happened while writing or how do you celebrate small victories?

- Best thing is something I can't actually talk about because of the Spoilers. I celebrate small victories by waltzing around the kitchen with my cat. No lie. My boy can confirm.

6. Write Crew: Who do you communicate with or not communicate with while writing?

- I put the headphones on so the boy doesn't distract me. But sometimes I talk to my TTT buddies or the fine folk on Twitter for inspiration and/or working out plot problems.

7. Write Secret: What's your writing secret to success or hidden flaw?

- Secret to success: trust the process and don't stop just because it gets hard. (That's not really a secret, but it is a truth that's difficult to accept sometimes.) Oh wait! My real writing secret is that when you don't know what to write, write a dream. Or a flashback. Even if you don't end up keeping it, it always seems easier to churn these out than the narrative storyline. And it can produce useful ideas!

8. Write-spiration: What always makes you productive?

- Music and tea! I am also highly inspired after reading a good book or watching a good movie. And reading about other writers.

9. Write Peeve: What's one thing writers do (or you do) that's annoying?

- Overly descriptive passages that don't serve the story. My biggest pet peeve about myself is my inability to finish something before moving on to the next project. But I'm working on it!

10. Write Words- Share one sentence from a project. Past or present.

 - From Grave of the Goddess:

He felt like an hourglass running out of sand.

(And here's the video. I love writers talking about writing!)

Weekday Work Schedule

March is the month of being awesome, so I am trying to do a new thing every week in that vein. Last week I created my goals for the month and started in on all of them - with mixed success. But my overall effort pleased me (no burning out so far!) so I'm not going to detail the failures.

This week I am implementing a structured weekday work schedule. It's something I've tried in the past, but I always ended up taking a day where I said "fuck it" and spent the whole day watching TV and eating cereal straight from a box. Ugly, I know. But I think I've set myself up for a relatively painless segue into a structured workday this time because for the past month or so I've been good about working every day and - much more importantly - treating it like work.

("Work" has always motivated me. Ask any boss or teacher I've ever had; I was one of their best employees/students and they never had to wonder if I'd have something done on time or if they'd find me idly not working whenever they stopped by.)   

Here is the schedule I am striving to maintain, starting today:

Wake up at 0700 - doable since this is when the boy's alarm goes off.

0700 - 0800: Make breakfast (COFFEE) and read a book.

0800 - 0900: Blog stuff / social media stuff.

0900 - 1100: Work on Holyoak Five.

1100 - 1200: Pick something in the house to clean. (I use Unfuck Your Habitat for motivation and you should too.)

1200 - 1300: Make lunch and read some more of that book.

1300 - 1500: Work on current WIP novel. (For now, Grave of the Goddess.)

1500 until the boy gets home or until I'm done: Clean the kitchen.

Wish me luck! I'm confident in my abilities to focus, but I have the worst time forming habits. I have actually put an alarm into my phone for every single one of these time frames just to keep me on task. Or, you know, cause guilt if I'm backsliding.

How's everyone else in the Write Motivation community doing with their goals? This week I hope to start making the blog rounds during my social media hour in the morning to do some cheerleading. :)

On Being 27, and My Monthly Goals

Yesterday was my birthday. And now I'm 27. There is a funny thing about this age – and by funny, I mean morbid. Have you ever heard of the 27 club? By pure coincidence (I'm sure), several famous musicians have died at the age of 27. Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin… Just to name a few.

Okay, I don't actually think I'm going to die this year, but I am morbidly convinced that something awful is going to happen to me or someone I love. Is that stupid? Maybe, but it's there. I've been obsessed with the idea of the 27 club for a long time; I'm even writing a book about it - A Hunter's Fire.

At any rate, I think 27 is going to be much better than 26. On a superficial level, I like odd numbers better than even numbers. Also, the number seven has always been kind to me. Both 17 and 7 were wonderful ages for me. Not to mention, I still have three years to go until the dreaded 30. So that's not too bad.

Enough of that. Let's talk about writing.

January was a total wash in terms of writing. I was supposed to be finishing Grave of the Goddess, but I barely got anything done on it. February was much better: I started writing Holyoak Five, and that has been going swimmingly. (If you haven't read this story blog yet, please consider checking it out. Link is below, or in my sidebar.)

I want March to be my month of Awesome. Because I'm still unemployed, I'm able to be extraordinarily productive in terms of my writing. I want to take advantage of that for as long as I possibly can. So in that vein, let's take a look at my goals for this month.

MARCH GOALS
 1 - Participate in Write Motivation
2 - Blog post about writing once a week
3 - Booking Through Thursday post once a week
4 - Post an episode of Holyoak Five every Friday
5 - Finish reading at least 4 books (in an effort to catch up to my Goodreads challenge)
6 - See note.

Note! I posted on Write Motivation that I wanted to catch up on my backlog of critiques for Grave of the Goddess's first chapter, BUT I think it's far more important to just finish the rough draft before I start in on the rewrite. I was hanging with my boys yesterday, and they agreed with me about this. So I'm adding a goal of ~500 words a day of work on GotG for March.

All right. Wow, if you stuck around through all that, thanks. My final note is this: I followed everyone from the Write Motivation roll call sheet on Twitter and by blog, and I'm hoping to participate a good deal in a community of motivated writers. Here's to making friends and enjoying the community spirit.

Hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting to say. This post made me feel wicked self-conscious. o.0

So far...

I swear, I am the worst at keeping resolutions. Just the worst. I keep telling myself to blog as much as I write, and it just never happens. Ugh.

Here are my goals for 2014 - because isn't that pretty much everyone's first blog post of a new year?

1 - Finish the first draft of Grave of the Goddess and start working on the second.

2 - Find a job. Yeah, I was laid off from my job the same day we closed on our house in late July. Yeah, I'm still unemployed. Yeah, it's a problem.

3 - Walk more. As Michael Moore and many many others say...

4 - Revive my science blog. More on this to come.

That's all for now. Because I'm trying to be practical, and not set myself up for failure. And also because these are all things that I'd be trying to do anyway - it's just nice to set them down in words with a reasonable expectation of being held to their standards.

New year! Yippee!

Who doesn't want to go camping in April?

That's right - camping in April.

CAMP NANOWRIMO THAT IS!

A-hem. Pardon the overly enthusiastic announcement. My life has been full of enthusiastic announcements lately, but this is the only one that's entirely about me. Today I embark on my quest to finish what I began in November, namely my novel Grave of the Goddess. By April 30, I hope to have my first draft of this YA fantasy-adventure-romance-quest-thing all piled up on my desk and ready for the red pen of doom. After that, who knows?

(Well, actually, a lot of query letters to agents and publishing houses. That's what comes after.)

So join me in camp if you have a writing project you need an extra kick to get started on. Or just come and hang around the campfire with us. The marshmallows are toasted to perfection!

Actually it's a lot like this....

And also this....

....as for other enthusiastic announcements, here is a brief rundown.

1) My younger brother got married! And he's having a baby! It's a girl! I'M GONNA BE AN AUNT! WITH A NIECE! Words can't express how much I already love this kid.

2) My older cousin is having twins! TWINS! And they're going to be the best nerds of all time. Woo, nerds!

3) The boy and I just got our offer accepted on a house. I'M GONNA BE A HOMEOWNER!

Holy crap. Is that enough? I don't know. Oh, and my ickle bro is graduating Army Basic like.. tomorrow. Woo hoo! Now if I could just become a full-time worker at my new job and simultaneously find a great deal on a new laptop life would be just about perfect.....

Novel Roulette

I don't presume to know how many other novelists out there are like me and constantly playing roulette with their projects.

I figure I've got seven fiction novels that I've created detailed worlds for and written large portions of their plots. Seven. And I am not the most productive wordsmith in the world by a long shot. So I end up focusing on maybe two of these projects at a time, only one if I'm either extremely inspired or if I'm being perversely focused, but usually two so I can world build for one (which is fun and relaxing) when I'm stuck in actually writing the other one.

For example, here's how the past five months of my writing life have gone:

October: got wicked excited about plotting Grave of the Goddess and decided to write that while waiting for NaNoWriMo to start. Pretty much focused exclusively on this world even while nominally working on some kind of plot and characters for my planned NaNo, Solemn Vow. Also spent a ton if time in the NaNo forums soaking up all things writing.

November: ditched the chick lit idea immediately to write Grave of the Goddess for NaNo. Worked only on this all month. Wildly successful except for one week where I got bogged down by a slow part of the plot and the presence of relatives.

December: relative crash and burn. Set everything aside for several weeks. Wrote nothing, not even journal entries. I still can't decide if I did this to recover from NaNo or if the bad effects of unemployment were starting to gnaw at my creativity.

January: slow slow slow. Set Grave aside entirely. Instead, spent all my creative time invested in rereading and thinking about how to restructure A Hunter's Fire, and also creating ridiculously detailed history for my Stormwatch series.

February: got a freaking job! Also completely lucked out as the job has copious amounts of free time where no one cares if I'm reading or writing my own stuff. I've finally come back to Grave of the Goddess, just as enthused as November. But Face the Flames and Stormwatch are at my fingertips too.

I don't know if there's something wrong with me that I operate like this - with a writing backup, waiting to see where the ball lands today. But that's how it seems to be.

There's a story waiting for me -

I know there's a story waiting for me in this place - with its cloth-covered metal walls low enough for me to comfortably see over when I'm standing and its terribly dull wallpaper in the restroom. So dull it's a little offensive; you know, even cheap Chinese restaurants have better wallpaper in their one stall bathrooms than that. Offensive that we're all expected to just take all this dumb mediocrity like it's our jobs... Oh wait.

This morning there was a huge bank of deep purple cloud cover hanging down on the point of collapsing onto the southwestern horizon. I drove toward it, watching the little strips of softly glowing pinks and yellows straining to show up behind it, around it, above it - anywhere they could. And everywhere else things were a soft dove grey slowly turning bluer and bluer.

Maybe it's time to face the inevitability of blogging seriously. Every time I attempt to do it though, I fail miserably. Kind of like finishing my novels. I need a noveling buddy / someone to hold me accountable when I start falling off the bandwagon. Just means I need someone willing to be stronger at this than I am. Fuck.

Here's the plan: between now and April, finish the first draft of Grave of the Goddess. Get the second draft done by August, and in the meantime desperately seek agents and publishers.

Fight evil. Read books.

Gloomy weather today. I'm glad for it because it means I'm not currently staggering through the woods on little sleep and wondering when the day will be over. (Wow, that sounds weird if you don't know the context.) So I get to write all day! Good, because I haven't been doing as much of that lately as I'd like to be.

This week has sucked. Feeling physically horrible - though yesterday things turned around a bit. And Wednesday night in particular my brain decided to do that INTP typical torture itself thing. So I pulled out my typewriter and decided to use it to write in bed for awhile to figure out exactly what the hell my problem is. It didn't go great. I covered a lot of white space with words, but I don't think it really meant anything. I hate when that happens.

Today though, I am swimming through my fictional worlds with my muse at my side. I love it when he decides to grace me with his constant presence. So I thought I'd make a little update so you all could know what I'm working on.

Luca has trained with the Southern Sun Sages for as long as he can remember. Someday soon he hopes to become a full member of their order, pledging his life to the service of the ancient and eternal Sun God.

Kai is the oldest of seven brothers and sisters. Living on the edge of the Sun Lands, all her family has ever known is strife and the struggle to stay alive in a harsh landscape. With her parents and extended family tending to their failing farm, Kai does all she can to bring in food from hunting in the nearby forest - a place few dare to venture.

When Luca shares his vision of a young peasant woman, his masters reveal that his destiny is much different from that of the priest he hoped to become.

With her family's lives in the balance, the Sun Sages convince Kai to accompany Luca on a journey to the ruins of the Moon Kingdom. All they know is that they seek a grave... The grave of the Moon Goddess.

That would be the basic introduction of the YA fantasy I'm working on right now (The Grave of the Goddess - shocking title, I know). And here's a little summary of what I plan to do for NaNo - a chick lit novel called Solemn Vow: 

Melanie Fitzgerald is perfectly happy. And why shouldn't she be? She has a loving husband, plenty of friends, and a great blog. But when she strikes up a friendship with a one of her fellow bloggers, suddenly she's questioning things she thought she decided long ago. As the friendship moves toward something more, Melanie's perfect little world starts to crack.

I've got all kinds of characters for it so far, but not much in the way of a concrete plot. Of course, I've always been more of a "flying by the seat of my pants" NaNo-er, but I've also only won 3 out of the 7 times I've played this game, so..... No, this is my year! I'm gonna rock it out. I've even considered working on both this and Grave of the Goddess next month. I'm so embroiled in the fantasy right now, that I can't imagine it all just evaporating on the first.