The Plot Bunny Farm

Thanks to everyone who weighed in on Sabra and SF. Current word count on the file is just barely over 90k, so for length I don't really need to make major additions. Some scenes are being deleted, some added. Overall, it's going to stay about the same length. I'm going to finish the current edit pass, maybe making notes on things (such as setting reactions) that could use additional work. Then do a complete read-through and see if I think it's ready to go out to critters or if it needs more in-depth labor.

As to when . . . well, I'd hoped to have it done before now. A year ago, I finished writing the draft. I should've managed a single edit pass in that time! But it's been so long since I did anything on it that I have to work to get over that inertial barrier again.

So very much I want to be working on right now. I want Sabra's edit finished (which isn't the same as wanting to work on it, I realize). I want to run through Witchy Woman and re-outline and rewrite it. It's only 53k now, and that's much too short. And scenes need to be rearranged, in addition to the subplots being beefed up. Then there's this middle-grade SF novel I've started. Only a few thousand words into it, and I think it has a lot of promise. I need to get back into the discipline of "The Writing Comes First," so I can make real progress. Then I have this new urban fantasy (or possibly paranormal romance?) idea with a male MC.

But right now, all of that's taking a back seat to short story work. Yeah, I know, I said I was giving up on those for 2008. But I think "Ophid Dei" would be good to submit to Eclipse Two. (Just realized today that my story is a sort of response to Butler's "Bloodchild." Fascinating. I'm taking part in the dialogue of the genre.) So that has to be edited and out in the next week--by the 29th, in fact. And I want to submit "Winter White" to Cat's Curious Press, which has a deadline of March 31, but I need to wrap up the story *and* edit it in that time. Then I need to get my edits done on my submission for PARSEC's short story contest and get that sent off by April 15. I've had that written forever, so I've no excuse to not get it done.

All of this, plus keeping up with an adorable two-month old. Well, no, she's not running around yet, but she needs a lot of cuddling and feeding and changing. And it's awfully hard to do those things and type at the same time. I'm going to manage, though.

Some other time, I'll mention the *other* things I want to write, intermediate-length works for various contests. Right now, though, I've got to deal with dinner.

It's been a busy week. I've been working on putting together a marketing blitz for my business, and it's just been a little here, a little there, print 100 copies of this, and so forth. Then the printer ran out of ink, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I updated my business Website, too. I was a bit ashamed to realize I'd done nothing on the homepage in almost two years. The marketing letters go out in tomorrow's mail, and if anyone looks at the site, at least it's fresh.

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Still working on my crit for Teri. I'd hoped to have it back to her next week. Still might, but it's going to take a lot of pushing. Without the marketing on my plate, though, that's more feasible.

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In other news, I've completed my first draft of my NaNo, finally. I'll be pushing it to draft 1.5 next week as I go through and check to see whether there are any missing scenes that I can fill in now. Then Sabra goes on vacation for a couple of months, and I go back to Shadowed Sight.

It's here--November 1, beginning of that crazy month.

I'm off to a decent start--more than 1,000 words already, with lots of time left in the day for more.

I wanted to point out theNaNo Widgets for tracking performance.

Here's one of my favorites, the live participant icon:

If anyone wants to use me for comparison in a word war, my user ID is 31617. Lehigh Valley's regional ID is 254.



Good luck to all the other crazies out there!