Hello, hello, been awhile of silence but I'm back-hopefully for more than three bad posts. Life kind of crept up on me, reenacting the shower scene from Psycho. I didn't die, but it halted things for some time. I've caught up, mostly: gotten used to the busy mornings, the afternoon exercises, the strange disappearance of that block of time between morning and evening. It's ironic that right after I created and printed a schedule for myself, everything kind of back-flipped, so I have to analyze my days again.
So, on April 17th, 2010 I attended a festival with my sister, the Black Heritage Festival at University of Baltimore. There were vendors and performances-mostly vendors-and it was a nice taste of what she and I are in for.
I mention the festival because our table happened to be right across from the table of an author who also runs a publishing house (J.M. Benjamin, A New Quality Publishing). He made conversation with us, gave me a little info about writing a synopsis (or at least something to tell people on the street when they ask what I'm writing) as soon as possible, and told me to try submitting work to them to see where I'm at. I made my first connection, woo!
I did something I have never really considered before on Tuesday. I always read people's suggestions on other places you can go to write and thought "yeah, that sounds good" with a noncommittal nod to myself, but for whatever reason it occurred to me to spend my free day there. I didn't get many pages, but the atmosphere was a nice change; with nothing in the environment to distract me it was a bit easier to get coherent lines on the page.
It was a nice experience for me...or maybe it was the hot chocolate. I learned two things: I need to be in the library writing more often, and Seattle's Best makes very sugary hot cocoa, or sugary vanilla, or sugary hazelnut, I threw both in so I'm still narrowing down the suspects.
It hadn't occurred to me until a few days prior that the notebook was nearly full, and I was but two chapters away from the ending...and that I'd wasted most of the month being lazy instead of working toward my goal of finishing before May.
I did the same thing in February, and March. Pattern?
I think I've made some good progress. There's a frame, but the door is still under construction...and someone painted the bottom half puce instead of white. I'm not an expert painter, but I can fix it.
Lifewise, I'm just a bit anxious about May 1st, when I participate in the NAMIWalks event: a 2.5 mile walk through a park in support of NAMI (I'm lazy, so I'm just going to post the link to NAMI's website for more information- www.NAMI.org). It'll keep NAMI functioning, which I'm all for.
It'll be 2.5 miles of me getting to know my teammates better and get a lot of thinking done. And if my sister says it's cool, I might take her camera to take pictures of the park. Should be nice.
There's my updates for the past two months, and now I have to get work done.
It's February 26th, 2010.
Ask me if my novel I was going to finish this month is done yet.
I had some good momentum when I first started writing it, then that gradually died down to a full stop, then it picked up again in spurts of 1k a day every day, then became 1k every two days...this week I only managed a total of 3k.
But I guess as long as I'm moving, I'm good.
I won't be able to finish the first draft at this pace (obviously), I'm now looking to March since I'm over 80k words - finally. I want to get it completed so I can bask in the glorious light of having completed something, but also because I want to work on another WIP that I started two pages of before deciding I didn't need to divide my time up like that and just focus on one WIP at a time. Scenes from this one have been leaping into my head like fleas on a dog. (Please don't ask me why that simile was the first thing I thought of.) I should be writing them down...but I think I've officially run out of empty notebooks.
I know what I'll be buying next month.
I am rather proud of my 3k for the week. It's small, but it's the most writing I've done in the time span of a week for quite some time. And it's not only at the doctor's office waiting for my turn, but also everyday at a regular time that I've scheduled. (Why did I ever leave the wonderful world of time management?)
So, if I had a glass of wine, or even just a bottle of juice, I would give cheers to everyone for what they have accomplished in February, and encourage them to keep going, because there's nothing like passing that finish line...or writing/editing that final paragraph.
Well, I failed. I couldn't manage 50,000 words in one month.
In my defense, life hit hard and I started in the middle of the month.
I end January having written 16,000 words, bringing my novel's total to 73,000. I'm not so disappointed in myself for not making it, since I got some fairly good stuff written and I'm moving along in the story (A life-changing piece of information learned, oh no!). I would like to say February will be the month I finish this thing, as I shouldn't have that much longer to go, but I won't make it a definite; anything can happen in the next month, like, I don't know, me having to get a job to pay off some bills and finding myself too mentally drained at the end of each day to concentrate on words for a novel. Just putting it out there.
Nightmarish employment aside, I'm looking to February with a positive attitude. This novel will get done (the first novel I've completed in years, first novel over 60,000 words) by the end of the month, and then I can let it sit awhile before I get to do revisions...yay.
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