This summer I had a long list of things to get done. I’ve done almost none of them. My only excuse is I got distracted and overwhelmed by the moves going on in my life. Now at this stage I just want a bit of peace before the next semester begins. I have about three weeks before work becomes totally crazy.
My romance novel I got some of the prep work done for self-publishing but I also found one more place I may submit it to. I will have to read through carefully to see if it fits the guidelines. If it fits the guidelines, I’ll submit one more time before I attempt to self publish.
Moon Affirmations I’ve submitted to one more publisher as well. I’m hoping to hear sooner rather than later on it to see if they are interested. I hope so if not I will be going the self-publishing route on that one too.
My Magic series (working title – fantasy novel series) – I finish editing what I think will be the first novel. This story I started in November 2010 and I’ve been working on sporadically since. The story in its entirety is 600 pages plus and I’m not done with the story. In the last two weeks I’ve edited the first 200 pages. As I read I thought what was I thinking and rewrote about ten pages of material to make it better adding in a couple of scenes and filling out other scenes. I think total page count now is just over 200. I’ve got all these edits in the computer (need to make a back up of these edits – soonest possible).
Next I’m moving on to the second book in this series (or the second 200 pages). I am going to edit it while I let the first book sit and stew for a bit. Ideally I’d like to edit the second book quickly (maybe a week) and then read through the rest to see if I can work on the tail end to finish the story. I think this is too much to hope for before the semester starts though. It may have to wait until January.
Each time I come back to this story, I fall in love with it. I enjoy the characters, the plots, the world I’ve created. It is one of my favorites right now. I haven’t decided whether I will try the traditional publishing route with this or just do self-publishing. I do know that I’m going to be very protective of it. Right now it feels like a new born baby (yup almost three years old but still newborn to me).
Hopefully I will continue to make progress for the next three weeks. After that all bets are off as I will be in SUPER busy mode with two classes. Oh and one other thing I want to get done in the next three weeks – read the four books I bought for my two classes – should be fun huh? I’m actually looking forward to the grammar book – yup geek I know. I found another book I really like too. It is The Emotion Thesaurus: A writers Guide to Character Expressionby Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. It gives a definition of an emotion, physical signals, internals sensations, mental responses, cues of acute emotion, cues of suppressed emotion. It will help in editing to liven up stale description – so if I say a character was shocked – instead of saying shocked I could say they character suddenly stiffened – it sounds simple but when you are doing an initial writing saying the simple term is easy and then making it better as you edit is not always easy so this gives a list for the emotions. I think it will be a good reference book.