Gone Fishin’

It’s been a while since I’ve been here and I really can’t blame it all on the Temporary Bunny and other house guests. I’ve been writing some, but editing a lot more. I have thoughts about plotting vs. pantsing now that I’m editing a work that I wrote without a plan. I’ll write more on that later.

But I didn’t want to completely neglect this site, so here’s a photo from the attic archives. I’ll be back in a week or so after I get a partial ready to submit. And meet up with a friend for dinner on the river, attend an 80th birthday party, and go to a baseball game. In other words, enjoying the summer.

Have a wonderful week. Ciao!

Resolution Update — July 2013

This was a really good month for me. Probably the best writing month ever. Not only did I surpass my monthly word-count goal, but I also accomplished one of my 2013 goals – I finished a manuscript. I have a finished manuscript of Trust Me, I’m A Lawyer.

2.  Finish and edit TMIAL
This is the project formerly known as the novella. My intermediate deadline for this resolution is Feb. 14 — because Valentine’s Day seems like a good a day as any to finish writing a romantic story.

It’s certainly not Valentine’s Day, but it’s done. Finishing a manuscript was also one of my unfinished 2012 goals. And 2011, if I had been tracking my goals back then.

I wrote a book.

Sometimes I have to just write that out and let it sink in for a few minutes because I am so damn pleased with myself.

OK, back to the resolutions. I have gone through Trust Me with my purple pen and am making those changes in the electronic version now. It will go out to my critique partner next week for her review and I’ll focus on writing a synopsis and blurb.

I finished Trust Me on July 15 and then spent the last two weeks editing. But I did manage to write 17,152 words this month, which was more than my goal of 15,288 words. I’m now at 51 percent of my yearly goal, with 91,726 words written this year.

Most of my work this month was on Trust Me, with 9,192 words on that project. I wrote some notes on a sequel which amounted to another 576 words. And I had an idea that hit me in the middle of the night (again) and jotted down some scenes and a sketchy sort of outline for a new project, for another 7,384 words.

I’ll probably write more at length about the editing process later, but in short, it’s been challenging and I think I may have converted from a pantser to an outliner because making large changes to structure is much harder than I anticipated. I will again recommend Scrivener for making it easier to move scenes and chapters around, though.

So, to recap:  1) I wrote a book, and 2) there’s more work to do, but I wrote a book.

Bring on the red pen!*

Here it is — all 396 pages of the first draft of Trust Me, I’m A Lawyer. I printed it out and it didn’t fit in the binder I bought. So back to the office supply store, where I stocked up on editing supplies.

Taking the advice of many seasoned writers, I changed the font before printing this draft. It’s already helped. I’ve found several minor errors that I had read a hundred times and never noticed.

I have a long weekend ahead of me and hope to get some major structural changes nailed down. Then, I’ll print another draft and mail it off to my critique partner with some lovely thank-you gifts for tackling this project with me.

Not pictured: Chocolate, booze.

And once that package is in the mail, I’m looking forward to stepping away from this WIP and diving back into one of the many other projects on my computer.

* Well, not red pens. I don’t like using red ink. It looks so harsh. I have purple and green editing pens at the ready. It’s a kinder, gentler editing pen.

Resolution Update — June 2013

It’s not the goal I wanted to announce this month, but I can officially cross one item off my list of New Years Resolutions for 2013.

5.   Submit something    A leftover from my 2012 resolution. It can be anything — a writing contest, a query to an agent, submission to a publisher. Just put something out there to show what I can do.

I submitted something to a contest. My entry barely made it in under the wire, but I hit send. That’s a big deal to me. It also softens the blow of having not met my monthly word-count goal in June.

I did make some progress in my WIP, and wrote 9,304 words. Of that, 2,212 was on the sequel to the WIP that I’ve nearly finished. Sometimes the voices just won’t leave you alone. Hmm, that makes me sound unstable. Let me rephrase that:  The voices of my characters were speaking loudly this month, so I wrote some banter between the two main characters. I jotted down a few sentences in another project, just to make a note to myself about setting and description. And I wrote 7,010 words on Trust Me.

I wrote on 15 days in June. The first couple weeks were not very productive. I was stuck on a pivotal scene — so much so that I wrote it three times. I finally found a version that I like, so I am now moving on to the finale and then the resolution.

I’m behind on my yearly goal, which is to write 180,000 words in 2013. I’m 41 percent toward my goal for the year and I should be 50 percent done. I also only accomplished 63 percent of my monthly goal, which was to write 14,795 words in June.

I have a couple long weekends in the next month and my work schedule isn’t crazy, so I’m hopeful to make up some ground. I’ll also be participating in CampNaNo in July, but not with a 50,000 words goal. My goal will be to finish the last scenes of the current WIP, which will probably total fewer than 5,000 words.

And then? I’ll probably do some revisions and then ship it off to my critique partner. And while its away, I will either work on the next book in that series or maybe the previous NaNoWriMo project that I’ve outlined. Or who knows. Maybe more voices will make themselves known and make me tell their stories.

Not there yet, but I can see it from here

Finally.

I’m writing the last of Trust Me and finally feel like I’m on the downhill approach to a finish line. Unfortunately, a short trip out of town this weekend meant I couldn’t write the last two chapters. The remaining four scenes are outlined, but I didn’t do that for the final scene yet. Mostly because I’m not sure what happens yet.

I wrote a final scene and hated it, so I deleted the scene. I usually don’t do that. If there’s something that’s not working, I cut the words and put it into a file labeled “scraps.” It gets saved, just in case I can salvage it for parts later. Not this one. It went into the trash. It was not worth saving.

So I know what not to do in the final scene and that’s a start.

Throughout the story of Ben and Lindsey, they and the rest of the small city where they live have been suffering under a heatwave that just won’t break. But as things come to a head, a massive storm rolls through and the rain pours down.

While I was away this weekend, I enjoyed similar weather. Hot temperatures and high winds during the day, but then a brief thunderstorm in the evening. This and a long, boring drive provided some unexpected inspiration for the last twist in the story. And I hope that by the time I get to that last scene, I’ve figured out what happens.

Lucky Number ’13

    My New Year’s resolutions are eight days late. This might not be a great sign, if I had included something about breaking my procrastination habit. But fortunately, I plan on continuing to procrastinate. At least, in all things unrelated to my writing (and work, because income is nice).
    So with no further delay, here’s what I want to focus on in 2013.    
1.   Keep a monthly word-count calendar
    Not really a necessary resolution because something about seeing the numbers add up inspires me to keep writing. Plus, this is an easy one because it involves using my new-and-improved word-count calendar/spreadsheet. I changed it slightly this year so I will be getting more accurate counts for each month and I’ve already clocked in with more than 3,000 words so far. And it’s only Jan. 8! So far, so good!
2.   Finish and edit TMIAL
    This is the project formerly known as the novella. My intermediate deadline for this resolution is Feb. 14 — because Valentine’s Day seems like a good a day as any to finish writing a romantic story.
3.   Finish draft of PDT
    I have a finished outline and about 20,000 words of the first draft and I’m really excited to get back to this world. It’s a romantic suspense/crime novel set on the California coast, an area I know very well. Writing this is my reward for finishing TMIAL.
4.   Finish You, Again
    It’s three-quarters finished and I know who did it. There’s no excuse. But I’m still putting PDT ahead of this because, well, surfers.
5.   Submit something
    A leftover from my 2012 resolution. It can be anything — a writing contest, a query to an agent, submission to a publisher. Just put something out there to show what I can do.
6.   Professional development
    It may be time to network. Meet more authors. Join RWA or attend a conference. This isn’t so much a resolution as a reminder to take writing more seriously.
7.   Write something in first-person POV
    After reviewing my reading lists for the last two years, I realized that most of my favorite reads were in first-person point of view. But all of my writing has been in third-person. This year, I’m going to try writing something in first-person POV and see how it goes.
8.   Outlines for next WIPs
    I’ve got some preliminary outlining done on two sequels to TMIAL. I wasn’t sure until this year if I was an outliner or a pantser or something in between. It turns out, I’m an outliner. I think. We’ll see how it goes when I start writing PDT from the outline. But, in the meantime, I’m resolving to write the outlines for Fiona’s story and then Jude’s story. 
    So those are my plans for 2013. It’s a lot, but it doesn’t feel like a chore. And that’s got to be a good sign.