Friday, October 26, 2007

October blues

Every year it's the same. I want October to be a calm month, a month when I can get things ready for NaNoWriMo and Halloween and be rested by the time November first rolls around. And every year October is complete chaos.

Okay, I've exacerbated the situation this year by sending out all those queries at the beginning of the month. To be honest, I didn't expect to get responses on any of them this quickly. I'm not really complaining, since I've now had two requests for partials, but the whole process is jacking up my stress level considerably.

And I suppose September is a bad time to send out short story submissions, because by October the rejections have started to trickle in and I like to keep up a quick turnaround time on those. It takes time to get a manuscript ready even if the market research is (ideally) already done, so that's another bite out of the day. Or days.

This year I lost my head entirely and ran a short story workshop that spilled over into October. I really enjoy doing the workshops, but why, oh why, did I not realize what bad timing this was going to be? I feel so guilty if I'm late getting back to my students with every assignment.

And then, of course, there are Halloween costumes to be prepared, garden work clamouring to be done, housecleaning ditto...no wonder I've been rushing around feeling completely overwhelmed lately.

I suppose that's enough ranting for tonight, though. I'm about to re-order my to-do list and hopefully cross off a couple of items. Of course I'll probably also have a few to add...

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Knee-deep in NaNo...already!

Well, it's only the 12th of October and already I'm immersed in NaNoWriMo stuff. This morning I was at the local high school talking NaNo up to an English class there. I've already come up with some new goodies to give out at meetups, started checking the forums for new and interesting stuff, and oh yes, thinking about the novel I'm going to write. So far it's only a hazy idea hovering around the outskirts of my brain, but I'm hoping it will start to coalesce into something more substantial soon.

I hate not having a title yet. A title might assist the coalescing process considerably. Maybe I need to brainstorm something up this weekend...

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Monday, October 01, 2007

Submissions

Yesterday I finally had a chance to get my short story submissions back on track. Any that were returned over the course of the summer got shunted into the "deal with it later" pile, of course. However, between yesterday and today I put four stories back into submission and have another one on the "chopping block" to see if I can cut out some words, since I haven't revisited it in quite a while. I find as my editing skills improve I can often make improvements to older stories.

Today I hope to also have another go at the synopsis. I have some feedback from friends now and some suggestions for making it a little bit tighter. Finishing that, and getting some more agent queries ready, will be what I'm busy with most of this week.

NaNoWriMo sign-ups start today! Whoo-hoo!

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