Ringing in the New Year with a Bang

This is not a festive day for me only because I'm unusually grumpy with my work in progress. Maybe I can chase away the blues with some wine. Staring at it and working word by word doesn't seem to be working very well. Anyway, I will take the loathing elsewhere.

Amazon

My books are now available for Amazon Kindle pre-order!

The Drag

Every now and then, and by that I mean every time I have a good spurt of writing, I get into the drag. The drag happens the next morning after I've set my goals, reached them head on, and then kept going for the day until all my bad self esteem is shattered and I can do everything.

Then I wake up the next morning. I drag myself out of bed. I drag myself to the computer. I tell myself there is no possible way I can do this again. My word counts will not be is good, my work in progress is evil and out to get me. Then I procrastinate like my life depends on it. But I let myself drag, because the hardest thing in the world for me is to be happy with something I've written. If I gave myself license to be elated all of yesterday, I should reward myself with dire grumpiness and angst today. Then start at square one and try to achieve it all over again, one lousy swear word at a time.

I may create the drag, but once I have it, I know it's only a symptom of doing something right.

In VA in over two feet of snow

Posting this from the blackberry. I'm currently at a friend of a friends parents house because we're snowed inside it. It's awkward because I've met them maybe twice and now I'm practically living here. Thinking about the snow I did bring my laptop so I still have my work, but I can only get little chunks done because it's just weird here. The snow is pretty but getting home tommorow night with no four wheel drive on our truck is going to be exciting. We have two eight lb bags of sand over the wheel wells and hopefully that will be enough. I like not dying and I've got a book to release in febuauary.

Free Goodies Here

I was very productive today and as a result everyone gets goodies in the form of lots of good articles! Yay! Not only did I get six pages on my manuscript today and I revised my five year plan. So, here are the articles:

• Ten Writing Mistakes Writers Don't See 
• Some Insight Into A 5 Year Plan (though I like to make mine just about my writing goals and what I'm willing to do to accomplish them such as Publicity, more e-books, a newsletter, etc.)
• Romance Cliche's To Avoid 
• Insight Into Free Advertising 
• Dealing with Rejection 

Some of these aren't the most perky topics around but they are all pertinent and important to remaining a good writer at any stage in the game.

Slow Day

Nothing to really report here today. I had great inspiration at 4 am which I wrote down in bed by the light of my Blackberry. I wrote several pages on the rewrite, helped someone with a beta read or full read of their manuscripts, and researched my butt off. I'm off to do more of that now. I've got to find a good agent.

Deleting

I'm still in a writer mode where every scene I delete still hurts. It still calls to be revised until I can use it further, but then I spend hours revising it when a new scene would do just as well and not take so much time. It's a tricky business deleting out of the blue. I've even instigated a file for all my deletions so I still have the mis-matched pieces, but then I got lazy. Now it's just delete, delete, delete. I remind myself not the breath while doing it because then it hurts more, haha.

Anyway, here is my very short five year plan for now, because writing any more than this just seems silly when I don't know if I'll hit deadlines. But I know I need more concrete deadlines in here such: such and such date Publish an e-book with this line. Rather than just my works in progress. But if I never get any work done I won't have anything to sell, right? So here it is:

1.    2010
February 1st: Finish WIP
February 3rd: Finish Synopsis
February 6th: Finish Query
February 9th: Query 3 Agents
February 10th-May 10th: Finish Lesbian Assassin WIP
May 11th-June 30th: Edit WIP
July 1st-3rd: Synopsis
July 5th: Query (3 Books)
July 7th: Query Cleis    
July 8th: Query Agents
July 10th-Oct 10th: Imp WIP
Oct 12th: Synopsis
Oct 14th: Query Agents/Presses
Oct 16th: Write Siren novella

I'm only submitting to three agents right off because I've heard once you submit to them once with your work, it's bad form to submit more of your work later if they reject you on the first work. So I don't want to kill all my options when I get rejections. Pessimism will get you everywhere. I'll be figuring out a less hassle free way of doing 5 year plans and explaining it on here as soon as I can find the information and make it digestible.