Shiny distractions

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season! I know I did...regardless of my (now quite annoying) all-liquids diet that I'm doing through my doctor. But that's another story entirely.

Because of this all-liquids diet, I avoided the dinner table on Christmas Day, which meant I was writing as a coping mechanism. Over the last four months, writing has become my coping mechanism even more than it ever has been before. I figure this is a good thing. First of all, hi, it's writing and I love it. Second of all, if I'm able to make writing my main coping mechanism, maybe once I'm off this diet, food no longer will be.

Anyway, using writing as a coping mechanism means I get a LOT written when I'm avoiding big meals, which included Thanksgiving and Christmas (but not the Dudley Christmas, because it was buffet-style, so I didn't have to stare at the food in the middle of the table for three hours). For Thanksgiving, I got a lot written for my National Novel Writing Month novel. For Christmas, I got a lot written for "Child of Roses", the companion I'm working on for "Nor the Battle". Yes...I'm still editing/revising "Nor the Battle", but I have to actually write something, because I can only edit/revise for so long in one sitting before I get irritated with myself.

In other news...I got a shiny distraction this week. I mean, Christmas itself is a pretty shiny distraction (look at all the pretty lights!), but I'm talking a writing-related shiny distraction. It's a dangerous thing that tends to happen to me far too often to be appreciated. I got another story idea. But here's the proof that I've finally grown into better writing habits over the last couple years...I'm trying to ignore it. I wrote it down in a notebook, and every so often I'll write down more ideas for it, but I'm not going to start writing it until I'm done (or close to done) with "Child of Roses". When I was younger, I never finished anything. I have probably fifty half-finished stories and "novels" sitting in my desk or under my bed at this moment, because I'm great at getting thrown off course by the shiny distractions. And then I never finish. But that's changed now, because I'm making myself finish "Child of Roses". I think that's a great improvement.

Hopefully I'll post again before (or soon after) the New Year. I can't believe it's almost 2010 already! If I don't get the chance, though...have a safe New Year's Eve and a great start to 2010!

Long time, no post...

Let me begin by apologizing for the epic fail that was me keeping this thing updated during NaNoWriMo. Let's just face facts--I got distracted by the excitement. But I'm back now and still working hard!

To update you all on what happened with NaNo...well...I finally won!!! This was my sixth year participating and I finally crossed the 50k word finish line! It was a hard 30 days, for sure, but I definitely feel a great sense of accomplishment. I always love November. I love getting to spend the month writing just because I can. It's a great feeling.

Since the end of November, I have been working hard on "Nor the Battle" and trying to get it ready to send to agents. So far it's been through one intensive revision that, well, kind of hurt my head. The worst revision of them all was changing the gender of a minor character, because I'm still fairly certain that there's a gender-specific word that never got switched. I'll be taking it through at least one more round of revisions soon and then start querying agents.

When I'm not working on "Nor the Battle", I've been working on its companion, called "Child of Roses". So far I only have a handful of pages typed and written, and a very rough outline of characters, but for the most part I'm very excited about where it's going and where it'll end up.