Short-Term Goals

For a while there I was writing BIOH at NaNo pace, but the next two weeks are going to be crazy and there's no way I can do that much. So I am setting my absolute rock-bottom goal of 250 words a day. It's not much, but it's doable, and enough to keep the story from going cold, and will net me ~2,000 words of gain in the end. All-around win.

Yeah, So It's Been Awhile...

Jeez, I'm not even sure this counts as a blog any more.

Okay, this comeback post is a three-parter: Where the Hell I've Been, What the Hell I'm Doing Now, and Why the Hell I'm Back Here.


1) Where the Hell I've Been

Last I was posting consistently, I'd finished Mender and sent it out to agents, then immediately wrote 55,000 words on a contemporary romance novel. Then I burned out and took the summer off, fully intending to get back to work in the fall-- either back to the romance or doing a collab with Sharon (who I subsequently totally flaked out on). But then in September, The Husband's health started to slide downhill.

First he had a series of worrisome test results culminating in a liver biopsy. Then he had skin cancer, and since the surgery was on his head, they couldn't stitch it, so I was treating and dressing an open wound twice a day for six weeks. Then in early December, he landed in the hospital with a partial bowel obstruction.

Very long story short, he was out of work for the next six months. They tried to treat him medically with steroids, then had to wean him off the steroids for surgery. He had a PICC line all that time and was being fed intravenously at home by my. Had a bowel resection (his 5th, ugh) at the end of March and was in the hospital for three weeks afterward. He just started back to work full-time two weeks ago.

In the middle of all this, my father died, which was sad and complicated and shitty.


2) What the Hell I'm Doing Now

In the last year, I've made several attempts (most documented here) to get back to writing the romance, but I could never stick with it for more than a few days. I knew the sequence of events wasn't working, and I wasn't sure how much time and energy I wanted to devote to figuring it out, since it's a project I was pretty much just working on for shits and giggles.

While The Husband was in the hospital I decided to bag the romance and start something new-- something LitSpec, more serious and meaty. I bought a few writing e-books and started planning a new novel.

And then, because I am a perverse little chicken, I started seeing how the exercises I was doing for the new novel would help me untangle the problems in the romance. In early May, I gave myself a few weeks to do just that, figuring it would help me choose which project to focus on for now. May 17, I started the romance novel over again from the beginning. I've been able to use a lot of the 55,000 words I wrote in 2017, but I've made a lot of changes, including the POV, tense, conflict, and title (it's now called Bring It On Home).

As of today, I'm at 45,000 words (out of a projected 80,000). My medium-term goal is to have the book ready to submit to Pitch Wars at the end of August.


3) Why the Hell I'm Back Here

I don't know if I'll have any readers, but this blog as worked for me in the past as an aid to setting and keeping goals. I'll think about what kind of posting schedule is going to work for me.

Also, I miss having a place to ramble about books.