If anyone was wondering what happened to me...

I've been posting to my new blog: Rain on a Summer Afternoon

My real name... my real work... YIKES. Check it out!

The world still turns...

...only slightly off its axis.

Well, I suppose I should have written much sooner to mention I was still alive after the earthquake and tsunami and all of that. Sorry, if you were worried. Today, though I don't feel like addressing the terribly serious topic of the disaster. I have much to say about it, but I've already said most of it in other places (mainly my website that actually has my name attached to it) and I a. don't really feel like repeating myself and b. am in a slightly more chipper mood than is required for respectfully addressing the devastation wrought by such an even.

Instead, I'd like to talk about things that are happening in my life. Good things, as it happens, and more than one of them. For one thing, I'm a few days away from completing my first ever triathlon and I am reasonably confident I will finish within the time limits and all will go well. For another thing, (and it's directly related to the first thing) thanks to all the training I've been doing I'm back to the weight I was when I got my first driver's license at 16 and I'm in possibly the best cardio shape of my life. For yet one more thing, I have not one, but TWO schools back in the US interested in me as a candidate for a teaching position. Nothing is even remotely final in either case and I haven't had a job offer yet, but both sets of interviews are going well and I am cautiously optimistic. It could all fall apart at the last second, it wouldn't be the first time it had, but it's nice to know that you've still got enough allure to reel a few in. And for a final thing, there is a hypothetical situation for returning home in which the man I'm over the moon crazy about and I might get hitched. Despite my general skepticism about matrimony, I find that I'm rather excited about the possibility of shouting my love from the rafters and having a big ol' party to celebrate it.

To top it all off, I have a paying writing for some short stories that I'm working on, and things are progressing with editing the latest novel. In other words, life is pretty good. I'm an extremely fortunate person and I hope I stop to appreciate how lucky I am often enough.

For the moment I'm going to celebrate by running a few miles. It's a beautiful day out there so it looks like the sun and the wind and the earth will be celebrating with me. That's a good start.

Rolling along...

Well, I finished my first round of edits and sent my first draft off to my first readers. I have gotten feedback from two of them but am still waiting on the third. Once I hear from all of them I will do my second revision and then I will send the result off to the small press that wants to read it. So, things are progressing... slowly.

In the meantime, I'm keeping busy by training for a triathlon. I signed up for a race in June and started a training program about 3 weeks ago. Things are going well so far. It's exciting to be getting back in shape and to rekindle my love affair with swimming. Also, it's exciting to have a fairly substantial goal ahead of me. I'm doing an olympic distance race which means that the swim is 1.5 km the bike is 40 km and the run is 10 km. In the world of triathlons it's not that big (there are some seriously insane triathlons out there) but in the world of people like me who haven't done long distance running or biking in a long time/ever it's a pretty big deal.

So, life remains pretty interesting. In the meantime, there is the terrifying prospect of having to find a job back home in the US before we leave here. Yipe! I'm working on it, but it's slow going and I'm working hard not to get discouraged.

All and all life is pretty good. I will update as soon as there is anything movement on the novel revision/publishing front. That's it for now.

I leave you with this food for thought: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpypeLL1dAs

Editing Blues

So, I put off editing Gwendamned for a good 3 weeks. The first week was intentional, the last two were not so much. In truth, for things to be done ideally, I would not look at Gwendamned for another couple of months, let alone weeks, in order to get some distance from it before coming back to edit it. But, that's not a luxury I really have at the moment. Since I have someone waiting to read this I feel the need to get it done sooner than later. Also, though I know it's a crazy dream, and may not be all that plausible I'd really like to have a book in print before I'm 30 (I know it's a stupid and arbitrary goal, but hey, it's been a secret dream of mine for quite a few years now). If I didn't have someone interested in reading a novel of mine already, I would consider getting something in print before August of 2012 an impossibility. I know that the time from a publishing house purchasing a novel to getting it in print can take up to and over a year, let alone the time it generally takes to submit and get rejected quite a few times before you even find a publisher who is interested in it.

But, because I've got a small publisher interested in at least reading it (with admittedly no other promises) I feel like that jump-start might be able to get me to print before August 2012. But, I recognize that it's still a long shot.

Oh, well, dreams are dreams and I will do my damnedest to make this one a reality, but if I don't make my completely arbitrary and really not too terribly important time limit, so be it.

Anyway, random temporal goals aside. This editing thing is kind of a drag. Of course, I only say that because right now I'm doing the most boring possible part of the editing process. I'm creating a spreadsheet. Yes, you read that right a spreadsheet. After poking about on the interwebs I came across a few helpful posts about manuscript editing and came across the supposedly useful tactics of spreadsheet editing and the shrunken manuscript. They seem viable and I am giving them a shot. Of course, what I really want to do is take Holly Lisle's course "How to Revise Your Novel" but that's a five month course and I want this done before that. (Remember the whole arbitrary deadline I mentioned earlier?) So, yeah, I will take Holly's course but with one of my other finished manuscripts. I do have a few to chose from. Heh.

So, as someone who doesn't even plot much, this whole spreadsheet-as-way-of-editing thing is kind of a novelty. I've found that to do it properly I have to go through and make chapters. Or rather, I don't have to, but they turn out to be kind of useful. I never write with chapters in mind. I just write scenes. It's a bit odd to think about my books in terms of chapters, but I think it might be quite useful as an editing tool even if I don't keep them in the long run (though I might keep them anyway).

I'm looking forward to the actual editing bit. But the spreadsheet making is kind of a pain in the ass. Yet I already see the value in it. I've learned one very important lesson already and found something that's going to take some serious work to fix. My novel has no obvious timeline. I have no idea how long a period of time the book takes place over. It could be anywhere from 3 months to 2 years. I think it's more like a year and a half but that's just a notion in my head, the book really doesn't make it clear at all. I should probably sort that out.

Well, that's all for now as I have to get back to editing. But I thought I would just throw that out there. I might not be back until after the holidays, but I hope everyone enjoys them. Happy Solstice!

63,884 words = full plot

WIN!!!!! So, I may have passed the 50k mark a week ago, but that didn't mean that I felt I had finished NaNoWriMo. My secret inner goal, was to finish the entire book, regardless of length, during November. Last night at 11:15pm, that happened. Woot!

So, now I've got a completed first draft that needs a ton of work, actually it's not even a first draft yet, because parts of it that were written down by hand outside of November still need to be added in. But, that can all be done with relative ease and now I'm going to take some time off to study for a big Japanese Language Proficiency test that I have this weekend.

That's really all I have to say at this point in time. I am excited, I am looking forward to revising (which is kind of a new feeling so that's good) I am happy and I am tired. I also don't really feel like I've finished anything yet because this is just the rough draft. I am really looking forward to actually editing this enough for it to feel like a real novel.

I'm also feeling a bit dopey so I think it's time to wrap this up and go put some food in me. Hope everyone has been enjoying their holidays.

Why do I always stay up until 3am and then START writing?

I blame my mother.

I discovered recently, while chatting with my mom via skype (yay 2 cents a minute to the US from Japan!) that she also stays up ridiculously late to get work done and finds that she works best a. once everyone else is asleep and b. when she's coming down to the wire and has to produce quickly in order to meet a deadline.

Which means I just had a huge bit of my eccentricity explained away by genetics. Well damn. That's boring. But, also interesting. The nature vs. nurture debate is always an interesting one, and I find it strange that until this recent conversation with my mom I'd had no idea that she had the habit of staying up late to get work done after others had gone to bed. (I did know about the last minute deadline bit, but still.) It took me 28 years to find this out, and exhibit the exact same behavior. It strikes me as strange to think that there's a night owl gene, but that would appear to be the case.

Right, so that said... True to form and genetic inheritance, it is indeed 3am and it's time for me to get back to work on my novel. I'm at 57,208 words and I'd like to get to 60 or 65k by Tuesday at midnight (and more importantly get to the end of the plot). Things are indeed wrapping up. I think it's quite reasonable to think that I can wrap up the plot somewhere around the 60,000 word mark. I like where things are going but... I need to make sure I don't freeze up at the end. Endings are so difficult. Generally, once you set everything up they play themselves out pretty nicely. As I recently said to my partner in everything "Writing the ending is like setting up a really elaborate set of dominoes, it takes a lot of careful planning and painful work to set it up, but once you flick the first domino it generally takes care of itself." As to whether or not that quote is of my own making I'm not entirely sure. At this point I've read many a motivational essay on writing and it's possible I've snagged it from somewhere without realizing it, but at the time I considered it original and I can't actually remember reading it anywhere.

So, that's my one nugget of writing wisdom for the day.

Which means now I should get to work... I don't know... is everyone else completely asleep? **hears metaphorical crickets chirping and rain, wind and hail pattering on window** yeah I think so. Better get to it then.

50,000 words, check. Finished novel, not so check...

Well, it's now November 24th and as of yesterday at around 10pm I passed the 50,000 word mark. Yay!

But that's only about 75% of the plot, so I still have a ways to go. Still, it's one big accomplishment and I'm quite happy with it. I think that the finished novel will be around 65,000 words or so, and I think I can get there before the month is out, but to do so is going to take some serious work. Of course, that means I probably should have written something today... ahem... well, today was busy with quite a lot of things that weren't writing and I'm afraid there was no way around that. But, now... well now I have some time to write before I go to bed and I should get to that.

First, though, I'd like to tell you a little a bit about how well things are going. Because, that is, after all, why I decided to write this post.

My plan is working. Using NaNoWriMo for this novel has quite effectively shut up my inner editor and things continue to flow. So far I even, *gasp* dare I say it?, LIKE 90% of what I've written so far. I shudder to think about it. Of course, it remains to be seen if any of it holds up to the revision, but I haven't felt like I've been churning out crap much. That is always reassuring. So, I'm excited, and hopeful and starting to feel a bit nervous about the thought of getting this novel out into the world. But, I also feel confident. I think this is a solid idea, and I think that I'm doing it justice with my writing. I'm pretty sure, that I've learned a lot from the three novels that I've written so far and I only hope that my revision skills (which are close non-existent) manage to cohere in time to get this thing in shape. We shall see.

I'm seriously considering taking Holly Lisle's revision course in the not too distant future (though it'll have to wait til I've finished my TEFL class) but that's a 22 week course and I'm hoping to finish revisions on this book a tiny bit faster than that. So, I think I'll use one of my other novels for the revision course and then apply knowledge gained from that as needed to this novel.

Right. That might not have made any sense to anyone. But here's hoping that either a. it did or b. it didn't but that's ok because no one is reading this anyway, or better yet c. it didn't but that's ok because whoever is reading this finds me witty and charming and is willing to forgive the occasional spewage of nonsense.

That said, it's time to get back to writing. Yay.