Okay, back to the real world.

Well, as much of it as I ever visit.

I keep making schedules for the work I need to get done. And by the time the schedule is done, it's either out of date because there's something new or I'm already so far behind that it won't help. I'm sure I can get this better organized. Really.

I'm up to chapter six on Muse. The current plan is to put it out on my birthday if not before. I am tying to keep good thoughts about this one. We'll see how it goes!

And that, once again, is my exciting life. Snow, writing, cats... what more could a person ask for?

Yes, it is official. Honor Bound is out.

And can you ask for a better back cover set of blurbs than that? It's taken me a couple days just to stop pulling it down and looking at it. (grin)

You can order Honor Bound here.

I'm quite happy with life right now. I'm even happy with our 19 inches of snow that may nearly double in the next 24 hours. I would rather Russ wasn't going to be heading for Omaha for a couple days, given the weather... but we'll see.

I'm getting things caught up again. I know it won't last, but I feel as though I'm actually making way through the piles of work that keep hitting me. Muse is moving along very well and I have hopes for it. I really do. I can see some of the things that I need to cut back on in it, and that I need to add a few scenes revolving more closely around the mystery part... but over all, it's coming together well. I will be sending off a submissions package by the end of this month. I don't know where I'm going to send it quite yet, but it's going out.

February has started busy and I suspect it's going to stay that way, so expect my posts here to be sporadic. Not that I would have much to say anyway. I have no life. We all know that by now. (grin)

Reflections on the windshield

I've decided to start doing a look how well I'm doing on goals and work at the end of each month. At least, I'll try to remember to do this each month, but there's no guarantee. My mind doesn't really work well on those sort of 'date' things.

But anyway....

The State of the Writer Report, January 2004

My focus this year has changed, of course. I have new things to take care of, new duties and new worries. But I'm happy to say that the changes have not been as drastic or troubling as I feared they would be.

Forward Motion is moving along very well. We've gained about 1500 new members since NaNo, and many of them are finding their way into the crit pages, asking questions, joining in at chat, etc. This has been an extremely good group who are obviously interested in writing and not trolling for trouble. In fact, there have been fewer problems in the last few months then I ever remember. The moderators have been wonderful in helping to revise some of the forgotten boards. I think the site is doing very well, and it's great feeling.

The two year novel class is going well, too. We're about to move into character development and planning. I'm looking forward to seeing how some of the others usually create characters and see if what I offer helps anyone. We have divided up into genre groups now, and I can see that there is going to be a lot of help given from one to another. It's a great group.

Back to School for Busy Writers is giving me a little trouble right now. I need to get it better scheduled and have people turn in the work well ahead of time so that I know it's ready to go. Prior to this I've just trusted both them and their computers to cooperate. A disaster has left me with an open spot in February that I'm working on filling right now. Lucky for me that I had an idea for a strange class already in my head and got most of it mapped out yesterday. It's going to be a lot of writing that I hadn't planned on, though.

Vision is giving me problems because of a technical glitch with the checks. Honestly, I don't know why we keep having trouble with that part. It's not like I haven't run a business before and had business checks. I think it's just a curse. I'll have to sacrifice some dust bunnies or something.

I am almost caught up on all the Double Dragon Press work. Deron has asked me to look over a submission, and I've been reading it the last two days. At the moment the submissions are closed, and that's good. I need a little break to get caught up on other work.

Writing?

Well... it's been odd. I've been purposely going slower than usual this year because I gave myself a goal of half a million words -- half of what I've written in the last two years. I want to get a lot of the material I've stacked up edited and submitted. In that respect I've done very well. I have edited, at least a little, every single day this month. That's a record for me. I'm working on Muse, and I'm about ready to put together the submission package. I haven't done this in a while, at least not for a print novel submission.

I have been so caught up in working on Muse that I've pretty much dropped everything else in new writing for the moment. I am determined to get the new material written for Muse, and everything edited. I am going to do a submission package and get it out before the first week of March.

Farstep Station keeps calling to me, but I'm holding off on jumping back into it. I hope to do some more short story writing as well soon. But first I have to get Muse done. I am making myself stay focused on it, which is good... but difficult for someone who is used to working on multiple projects. The only thing that saves me is that I have a lot of nonfiction writing to do at the same time -- Back to School material as well as the two year novel course. I have about 63 pages of material on the novel stuff, and a publisher who might be interested in a finished project, so it is definitely getting counted in new words now. (grin)

I've had two story acceptances this month and one poetry rejection (held over from a submission last year). I did get my two submissions out for the month, but it wasn't easy. I need to start working sooner on that for next month. Of course, if I do this right, one of those submissions will be Muse.

Total new words for this month will be slightly over 45,000. Edited page count is slightly over 100. I need to get the second number up higher, but I'm still doing pretty well. Two submissions, one with an acceptance already. So, goal wise, I'm hitting pretty much right on line.

Of course, January is always the easy month. Let's see how I'm doing around May...

That's Wind. He's such a cute guy.

Well... until about 3:30 this afternoon, I thought I was very nearly caught up with everything. But about that time I learned that I'm short a class for Back to School in February. It's way too late to ask anyone else to come up with something on such short notice, so that's what I've been working on all afternoon and night. It's going to be an odd class, but at least it's something I can mostly handle without too much work.

Russ is home. Yay! We had a nice dinner and he told me all about the stuff he did in Omaha. I told him how cold we've been and about various on line bits.

Over the last three days I read my two NaNo novels from this last November, and I have to admit that they weren't horribly bad. The first one needs more work than the second, but I think the story lines held up pretty well and the characters were interesting. I needed to look at something of mine besides Muse. It was a good way to spend a few nights, curled up in bed with lots of covers and a half dozen or so cats.

I'm very happy with Muse as well. I haven't quite decided where to insert the new material for it, but the editing on the first part is going well. I am going to start looking at cover letters, query letters, synopsis... all that other fun stuff as soon as I get past 100 pages of editing on it. Once I get the submission package out, I'll go back to finish the edits.

You will have noticed that I've dropped just about everything else in fiction writing. This is because of outside work at the moment. Once I get caught up with Back to School (again!) and get the work done for the Novel Class so that I'm a month ahead or so, then I'll go back to work on Farstep Station and maybe a short story or two.

Right now I only have time for one piece of fiction, and since I've told myself that Muse is going to be in the mail before my birthday, I had better not drop the ball on it.

And now... back to work!

I am still alive. Just very busy. But I thought I ought to type something in here. A shame I don't have anything interesting to say...