My Lottery

There was a quote on Nathan Bransford's blog last week that I found very fitting for this phase of my life.

Here's an analogy sure to brighten the mood of the unpublished: writing a
book is kind of like spending a year creating a lottery ticket. Sunny days,
people! Sunny days!

I definitely identify with that statement. I've written five other books (none of which you'd ever want to read) and each time I was nearing the finish line I had momentary glimpses of being published. However, the hope was fleeting as I realized that writing a *good* book is not an instantaneous thing. It takes work, and practice, and a lot of disappointment. Once you've spent said amount of time writing it (here's where Nathan is a bit ambitious, since with a full-time job and any kind of life, it's nearly impossible to finish a book in a year), you can pretty easily determine if it's worthy of publishing or not. Certainly an agent can see that immediately. And if the writing is just not there yet, no amount of hoping is going to get you published. Your only course of action is to pick up your pride and start a new book. I managed that last time with ease. I was excited and determined when I began my latest book, mere weeks after I finished the last. This time I'm a little hesitant. I just poured my heart and soul into this book. The thought of starting over again sounds akin to cutting my heart out with an exacto knife.

Here's to hoping my number's up.

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: 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!