Word of the Day: Progress

76000 / 85000 words. 89% done!

I found this really cool word meter on another writer's blog and figured I had to have one of my own. Since I'm almost finished with my book, it won't be nearly as fun and interactive, but I like it anyway. I'll start fresh with it when I start in on the second book in the series. I'm also thinking about running a contest to name my second book. I'm really no good at titling. Silly thing for a writer to admit. But it's HARD!

Okay, so after my last revision, I cut the novel down to 76,000 words. I'm aiming for 85,000, so I still have a lot of layering to do in order to add the last 9. This should be no problem in relatively short order because I'm used to this approach of writing. I tend to write a first draft that is rather devoid of layers. Then I go back in during edits and layer in the good stuff. I find this keeps me from getting caught in the weeds of trying to make everything perfect the first time. It always comes out in the end anyway, no matter how I started out. So, 9,000 words and I'm 100%! Query letter almost done. Synopsis on the way.

Word of the Day: Winter Storm Warning

A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW...SLEET...AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVELVERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.

So this puts a bit of a crimp in my plans to go to Philadelphia for a nice relaxing weekend getaway. Last weekend the sun was shining, it was 60 degrees and cloudless skies... Of course this would happen NOW, just when I finally get a day off work to flee the city.

I suppose my cute little red rear-wheel drive sports car would not improve the travel conditions from hazardous or impossible to (*kneals in prayer*) a breeze! Why do bad things happen to good people?

Word of the Day: Tumult

a. Highly distressing agitation of mind or feeling; turbulent mental or emotional disturbance

I have spent the past three weeks writing, rewriting, virtually wadding up my computer screen and tossing it in the trash like all writers in movies tend to do repeatedly (at least I'm not wasting actual paper). Let me tell you something -- writing a query letter is one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life -- far exceeding jumping from a moving airplane, climbing the stairs at the Eiffel Tower and building a new website in six weeks. Mind you, I've never given birth or climbed Mt. Everest. Those, I imagine are harder.

I can't decide between danger and peril. Is danger too bland? Is peril too pretentious? I've already indulged in hours worth of time reading hundreds of different "great" query letters online that I could have spent just writing the damn thing. It's gotten me no where because my query still sucks and no one can give me a straight answer about whether I should put my title in all CAPS or if it's proper to underline the name of a newspaper. I might as well just write it in fifteen seconds with my eyes closed, seal it up and send it off. My chances of landing an agent are probably the same either way.

Dear God -- please intervene!

Word of the Day: Ineluctable

ineluctable \in-ih-LUCK-tuh-buhl\, adjective:Impossible to avoid or evade; inevitable.

Somehow, thanks to the inevitable passage of time, here it is, one day short of one year since I left for Egypt. I wouldn't have remembered except for the fact that I left the counter up on my blog. 364 days ago I left for Egypt.

Almost as much time has passed since I stopped writing new entries to the blog in order to finish writing my book. In my last post, I mentioned something about procrastination and how if I didn't just get going on it I'd still be writing it a year later. Well, that wasn't far from the truth, even without the blog to distract me. It's been a long, hard road with this one, because I get wild ideas that drastically change the course of the book and I indulge myself and give in to the whim. Every major idea I change leads inevitably to another month or two of editing and fixing. And that brings me to this very moment. No, I haven't finished the book, but I have begun to feel guiltly about the stagnant state of this blog. So I am returning to the blogging world, and will be using the word of the day to describe the process of marketing my book, now that it's about 95% complete and inevitably on its way to a much more arduous state than being written. It now has to withstand the rejection and scorn of so many agents and editors who will no doubt hate it, wonder what sort of idiot spent two years writing it, and reject the hell out of it.

Bring it on!