Tag: writing

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Happenings

  By current projects, publishing, writer development, writing life

I’m putting this lucky ladybug I drew as my illustration for this post, because I am feeling very fortunate right now. A number of good things have happened lately, not all of which I can talk about in detail, but I can throw out some hints. :)

Well, as to the first one, I can talk about it freely–I have a short story collection scheduled to come out later this year. It will consist of many of my previously-published short stories and probably one new one. My editors and I are working on the TOC now, and cover art is pretty much done. It’s exciting! It’ll be available in print and ebook formats.

I also have a publisher interested in one of my novels–provided I can make satisfactory revisions. That’s a somewhat nerve-wracking proposition, but I do have some ideas and will be diving into the project in the next day or so, once I clear a few more items off my list. I have a couple of months to make the changes, which should be do-able. We have a vacation in there but I’ll work around it. This is also, of course, hugely exciting, but I am trying not to get too worked up over it since nothing’s certain until those revisions are done and meet with approval. Of course I can let myself enjoy the fact that they liked the story enough to ask for revisions. :)

The third item was an invitation that I should really keep quiet about for now. But it’s very nice.

Will share more details on all of this as I can. For now–feeling lucky indeed!

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The Writing Room

  By current projects, personal & miscellaneous, writing life

Yesterday I happened upon this video, wherein writer Laurie Halse Anderson chronicles the building of her writing cottage. Wow, it’s beautiful. And she quotes Viriginia Woolf, who said:

“…a woman must have…a room of her own to write fiction.”

Note that I don’t think it’s only women who need a dedicated writing space. I think all writers deserve that spot where they can go and feel that they are in “writing mode”. It needn’t be a room, if space constraints don’t allow it–but it should be a place where you can get away from distractions and know that it’s time to write. (If you Google “writing room” and choose images you’ll find some lovely inspirational rooms to look at.)

I’m lucky enough to have had a “writing room” since we moved into our house fifteen years ago…it was a different room at first than it is now, but I’ve always had the space. I’m grateful for that.

But as I look around it now, I’m not sure that I’m being the best caretaker of that space. It’s pretty cluttered and messy and probably dirtier in the nooks and crannies than I would like to think about. So I’ve decided to overhaul it, clean it up and make some changes that I’ve wanted to make for a while.

Now, this decision makes me nervous, because I know my brain. I have a lot of writing and writing-related projects on the go, and my brain often chooses these times to cunningly push me into some big project that isn’t writing, because it doesn’t want to work that hard. So rest assured, I am not going to drop everything and start my office overhaul. I’m going to use it as a reward motivator instead. For every hour spent on writing, I will spend half an hour on the office. It will take longer to get it done, but I think it’s the only smart way to do it.

So now I’m going to go and take some pictures of it in its current pathetic state. These “before” pictures will not be revealed until I have the “after” pictures to go with them. By that time, you’ll all have forgotten about this project, I’m sure. But don’t worry, I’ll remind you.

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Hello, 2011

  By personal & miscellaneous, writer development, writing life, writing log

This is the promised “writing goals” post. I’ve sorted my plans for the year into short-term, medium-term, and long-term. I think I will also print them out and put them up on my bulletin board, because the fact that I habitually have to hunt around at the end of the year to find the last year’s goals makes me think I’m not using them to the greatest advantage.

Short-term (within the next one to two months)
1. Finish anthology story
2. Organize submission history/tracking
3. Submit Murder Prophet to second market

Medium-term (within the next six months)
1. Get short story submissions moving again (and keep them moving)
2. Revise and complete last year’s NaNo novel

Long-Term (by the end of the year)
1. Write five new short stories
2. Get another novel ms into submission

Besides all these things, I will be doing more school visits, regular critiquing for my SL writer’s group, and in the first part of the year, acting as a first reader for a writing competition, so I don’t think there’s any worry that I won’t have enough to do.

*Photo courtesy of rdragan79

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Goodbye, 2010

  By personal & miscellaneous, publishing, Third Person Press, writer development, writing life, writing log

Yes, it’s been a while. The end of 2010 flew past without even giving me a chance to properly say goodbye here. But it’s not too late.  I’m pretty sure I had made some writing goals for 2010…(digs around a bit and comes up with a dusty list)…yep, here they are:

Short-term:
1. Plan more structured writing time, if not daily then most days. Most of
the time I do a lot of procrastinating before I actually get down to
writing, and I know that’s a bad habit.

Result: I did get into a better writing schedule for at least part of the year.  I can’t give myself full marks for this one, but I made some progress.

2. Log my writing time for at least a month, so that I have an idea of how
much time I actually spend on writing.

Result: I kept these logs for a while, and decided that I did not spend nearly enough time actually writing, and too much time on writing-related-but-not-really-writing things.  However, I didn’t *fix* that problem as well as I might have.

Medium-term:
1. By the end of January, finish the last pass of the novel edit that is
almost done, and get it to my first reader.

Result: Completed this goal, but it was in July, not January.

2. By the end of February, finish the two (or three?) short stories I have
underway.

Result: Sadly, I can’t remember precisely what stories I was talking about here, so I don’t know if I did it or not.  I’m thinking not.

3. Get some more stories back into submission.

Result: Again, I did make some subs, but did not complete this goal as fully as I would have liked.

Long-term:
1. By the end of the year, complete the novel I started this past NaNoWriMo
and get it submitted.

Result: Did not do this, but wrote the second half of this story during NaNoWriMo 2010.

2. Complete the second anthology Third Person Press is working on, with a
projected release date of October 1st, 2010.

Result: Full marks for this one.  We completed the anthology and released it on schedule.

I’ve already made some decisions on writing goals for 2011, but I haven’t put them into short, medium, and long-term form.  I’m going to think about that some more and include the new goals in my next post.

Aside from actual goals, I also had three short stories published in 2010 and got a third novel into submission, did some great school visits, gave some classes and readings in Second Life, and, I think, grew as a writer and editor.  So all in all I’d have to say it was a good writing year.

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Vacation Notes

  By current projects, personal & miscellaneous, Third Person Press, writing life

As some of you may know, I’ve been on vacation all the past week. I brought along lots of things to keep me busy in case the Muse had an opportunity to visit, but the chances of that happening were severely curtailed when my laptop screen died the night before we left home. I brought it along anyway–since there was some work for Airborne that had to get done, vacation or no–and a small external monitor allowed me to use it. However, after consulting with my resident computer expert (hubby), we decided that probably it would be expedient for me to shop for a new laptop. With some trepidation, I did so, with the result that I’m typing this now on a new HP ProBook. I’ve spent quite a few hours copying and moving things from the old machine to the new one, and I think I’m pretty much there. It’s a nice fast machine with a pretty sweet keyboard, so I think I’m going to like it, although I wasn’t really ready to part with my old one.

In writing news, Airborne is done to the point that we’ve ordered the proof and it has been shipped, so if there are no problems with the proof when we get it, we’ll be ready to order copies. Whew! I feel a bit nervous calling it “done” until I’ve seen that proof, but it does feel like we’re almost there.

Two other writing notes–I’ve realized that one of the characters in the novel I’m writing requires a change of gender (not as part of the story; I mean I have to go back and rewrite him as a woman). And I’ll have more writing news come Monday. Stay tuned!

*Photo: Cavendish Beach, from peionline.com. Yes, I’m on Prince Edward Island. :)

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Juggling Projects

  By current projects, NaNoWriMo, Third Person Press, writing life

Sometimes I have so many writing projects on the go that it’s hard to decide what to work on or settle in to one thing. I’m a good multi-tasker, but that only goes so far.

So sometimes it’s easier to just put it all aside and write a blog post. :)

Lately I’m working back and forth between Third Person Press‘s Airborne anthology, and doing type-ins for my scifi/fantasy/mystery/romance novel The Murder Prophet. Both projects are on deadlines (albeit to some extent self-imposed ones). Both are also coming along really well. I wonder if that makes it more difficult to choose between them? I expect if one were a horrible slog and the other was flowing merrily, I’d be much more inclined to work on the latter and let the former wallow in its own misery.

I’m very fond of The Murder Prophet. No one else, not even my trusted first readers, has seen it yet, so that feeling could change in the next few months. I hope not. It was tons of fun to write, I love the protagonist, and I’m adding a slick little subplot now at the eleventh hour that is making me smile. Its mixed-genre lineage might make it difficult to place, but that might also work in its favor for niche or quirky publishers. However, that’s a worry for another day; right now I just want to get it to a point I can call ‘finished’ so some folks can read it.

Work on Airborne is also progressing nicely. We’re finishing up line edits on the last few stories now, so that they can go out for author approval, and I’ve started typesetting those that are already done and approved. The typesetting this time around has been a breeze; after figuring out all the hard stuff while working on Undercurrents, it’s a much faster process now. Not that I don’t run into any problems at all, but I have a better idea how to solve them, at least. Also, we have an almost-finalized front and back cover, an ISBN and barcode, and someone very cool lined up to write an introduction, so we’re pretty pleased.

I guess that’s enough procrastinating for now; I’ve sent out one story for author approval so far this morning, so maybe I’ll do type-ins for a while and see how I feel after that. Juggle, juggle. Sometimes the writing life is all about keeping the balls in the air.

*Photo by abeall. And my to-do list is never blank like that. :)