A New Look! A New Title!

One for the blog, the other for the book!  I just thought the blog needed a bit of a facelift, so here it is.  And Charlotte has always been a horrid title for a book, so I've come up with something better (with much help from my crit group!) and here it is.  Drumroll, please.....  To Call Home.  It has some duality to the meaning, which is nice.  And really, anything is better than Charlotte. 

Speaking of the book, I've got about two weeks to go 'til my extended deadline is here!  I wish I could say I'm done two weeks early, but..... oh well.  I haven't done much in the past two weeks, but I think I can still pull it out.  If I write like mad and stop reading so much.  I recently got a card for my local library and have been reading like a madwoman instead of writing.  I'm trying to do some research for my erotica project--mainly trying to find some good erotica to study!  I haven't had too much luck so far.  First, my library doesn't exactly have a huge selection of books classified as Erotic Fiction.  Second, there's a lot of crap out there, apparently.

I also managed to pick up a book or two that I've simply been wanting to read for a while now.  And most recently, I picked up two books by John Shelby Spong, a bishop in the Episcopal church.  I'd read excerpts from both of them while in college and was intrigued, so I figured I'd read them in full.  On top of that, they're both really good research tools for my other project, Confessions of a Non-Believer.  Spong's ideas really helped me to form my own spiritual beliefs into more concrete terms, and those ideas will be a big part of Bree's story in Confessions.  Write what you know, y'know??

So anyway, I actually have tomorrow off (Labor Day) which is completely unheard of when you're a member of management in the retail world.  Hopefully I'll leave the books (and the internet!) alone long enough to get some good writing done.  Fingers crossed!

Random Updates

My deadline for Charlotte, unfortunately (though not really that surprisingly, ha!), will have to be moved. I think just another month should do it. So September 15th it is. That should be enough time to finish writing and polishing, and to get a good query together. I've been doing pretty well with writing all the new pieces. Of course, I've run into a scene or two that I hadn't planned for but that seemed like they should be there. And I've been doing some bigger revisions on the first half than I'd originally bargained for. All in all, it's just taking a bit longer than expected. My procrastination has actually been minimal. :-)

I'm very much itching to get on writing new projects, but I've got to finish this one first. It's hard to write more than one at a time, especially when everything about them is so different. But I've got so many ideas! Confessions of a Non-Believer is the one I'll dive into next. While working on the query for that one (I realized it's much easier to write the query before the book is done rather than after!) I realized that I needed to shift the focus a little bit. Once I realized that, my brain was absolutely flooded with new chapter and scene ideas. After Confessions, I plan to start my big erotica project. I don't have a title, but I'll probably refer to it for now as Marisol, after the main character. I'm super excited about this one too, because I have a lot of ideas that I'm pretty sure are very fresh and novel, not quite like a lot of what's out there now. (Not to be conceited or anything, haha. But if I don't have confidence in it, who will?)

I'll try not to let the blog fall by the wayside. It's been nearly a month since my last post, but I'll try to keep it up a little better.

Last, but definitely not least, here are a couple new websites that I've been looking into recently:

GoodReads, where you can create a list of books you've read, write reviews, create lists of books you want to read, and then share all this with your friends!

Miss Snark's First Victim, where they oh-so-wonderful Authoress has fun contests, and lots of readers offer valuable feedback.

And then finally, a big thanks to Jessica over at the BookEnds blog for addressing my questions about revealing explicit content in a query letter.

Check! Well.....almost

I'm working on my list, trying to check a few things off. I'm almost there with at least one, but not quite. The query is beginning to shape up, and it' hasn't been as horrible a process as I'd feared. Don't get me wrong, it totally sucks, but it's not as painful as I thought. :-) I've gotten some writing done, and I'm getting closer to the end. But there's still plenty more to go. And I'm starting to freak about my word count now.... It's really getting up there.

But let's see, what else? Erotica short story? Submitting to a magazine? Nope, nothing there yet. Haven't heard back yet, either. The novel's been taking up all my time, I haven't even given any thought to the short stories just yet. A Snazzy Dialogue post? Not there yet, either. I'm frustrated with dialogue right now (I feel like a lot of what I'm currently writing is too dialogue-heavy and is a little lacking in other good stuff) so maybe that's why. But I've got a month to get it all done.

One month and counting.

Making Lists Keeps Me Accountable.... Yeah, Right!

I think I should probably do another post on Snazzy Dialogue, but I've been lazy lately. In every aspect of my life. Doesn't bode well for my Aug. 15 deadline, huh? I'm sure I'll make it though. I have a renewed sense of excitement about the story, mainly because a couple girls from work are so excited about it! They both want to read it. And I'm all about having as many test readers as I can. But just the fact that other people are as excited as I am about my stories just gives me a huge sense of validation that I hate to admit I need now and then.

Once Charlotte is finished, I can seriously get to work on Confessions of a Non-Believer (Bree and Luke's story). Plus, I can continue to dabble in the seedy and sexy world of erotica writing haha. It's been six weeks since I submitted my story and I haven't heard back from the magazine yet. Six more to go before I know it's definitely a 'no' from them. (Incidentally, I've only got about six weeks before my Charlotte deadline is here, so maybe one can keep my mind off the other till then.) I'm pretty sure I can write a couple stories better than the one I submitted, so I should do that and try again. I've just been so focused on Charlotte (or rather, so completely unfocused on my writing in general) that I haven't gotten around to it.

So here's my to-do list over the next six weeks:

• Finish Charlotte
• Write a killer query for Charlotte and send it!
• Dive head-first into Confessions of a Non-Believer
• Write at least one erotica short story and submit it somewhere
• Write another installment of Snazzy Dialogue posts

Sounds like plenty to keep me busy! Oh wait..... I also have a "normal" job. Damn. It's gonna be a busy six weeks.

Nose to the Grindstone

So I've been neglecting my blog posts a bit recently. I've been spending lots of time on Agent Query, helping lots of other people with their novels and not doing much work on mine. Oops! ha.

So something happened at my "normal" job about a week ago that made me think hard about what I'm doing with myself. And the honest truth is that I have no idea what I'm doing - why I'm working at a job where I love the people I work with but hate a lot of the actual job, and the pays not exactly spectacular; why I'm sitting around waiting for my husband's job to whisk me away to someplace better, even though there's no guarantee that will ever happen. And then I realized I'd be amazingly happy if I could sit at home and just write. Write and write, and read, and query, and hopefully get published. Of course we can't afford for me to do that just now. But who knows... maybe it won't be too long.

In the meantime, I have to use every spare moment I can grasp to really get serious about writing. To finish writing and revising Charlotte (I still need a better working title than that!) and get to work on the next one about Bree and Luke (which has the kick-ass working title of Confessions of a Non-Believer). I need to get a good query together for Charlotte. I need to send it to lots of agents. And I need to do it by August 15.

That's my self-imposed (and therefore liable to change), very ambitious deadline. August 15, 2008, I will send out my very first ever query letter.

So I'd better go get writing.