Mirthful May - 500 words/day editing/writing - all genres welcome!

lizmonster · May 1, 2018

Mirthful May. Because I'm laughing. Aren't you laughing? We are all laughing.

How was April, everybody? Did it meet your expectations? Exceed them? Was it a disappointment, a disaster, just not quite what you wanted it to be? Commiserate here.

What's on deck for May? How can we help you with your goals? Share and Enjoy.

Let's do this! :e2cheer:

Saoirse · May 1, 2018

It's May already? :faints:

:revives self:

Right. I spent April revising/editing Fireborn. I finished it on April 29, and I won Camp NanoWriMo.

I only have one goal for May: Fireborn's 2nd round of edits. It's due 6/1. Oh, and I need to get the cover made. I emailed someone today. She did the cover for my productivity guide (which I am releasing later this year — that's my next project). I am hoping she can do it. If not, I may end up doing it myself. But I really dunwanna b/c I suck at cover design.

Zan75 · May 2, 2018

Salutations everyone

Hope everyone is doing well.

LIZ - What are you working on this month?

SAOIRSE - Congrats on the win. Best of luck with the Fireborn edit. How's your mom's recovery going?

I've been doing some polishing work on my new opening chapter which I'd like to have wrapped up this week. I've also begun collecting a new list of potential agents to research and possibly submit to. I'm sure my ambitions will become more defined as the month progresses.

Saoirse · May 2, 2018

Thanks, Zan75. My mom is doing pretty well. She just started outpatient therapy. Good luck with the polishing and the agent list.

lizmonster · May 2, 2018

Hi Zan! Hi Saoirse!

I'm going to try to keep up better this month.

But I have a raft of family stuff kicking up right now, so I might fail. Please know, though, that I'm always reading and you guys keep me going. :Sun:

ANYway. I snuck under the wire and shipped Arkhangelsk to my betas at the end of April. (We'll just ignore the part where I was originally going to do it on March 1.) I've of course been completely second-guessing myself since, but I do think it's much improved from the previous iteration.

I also got my newsletter out. Four in a row on time! Which seems weird for me. And I got some revisions done on a short story I really like, only I'm chicken to put it up in SYW. (I'm also not sure what genre it is. It's a romance with a paranormal element, except the paranormal element isn't one of the romantic participants. So I'm not sure if it's paranormal romance or just spec fic. Or just romance. So if I can't figure out which SYW forum it belongs in, I don't have to share it, right??)

So, on deck for May, we have:

1) Draft a new query letter and get it up in QLH. I've been working on this for a couple of days. Have I mentioned I hate writing query letters?
2) Update the synopsis. I wrote a synopsis for this book a year ago, and one or two things have changed.
3) Okay, okay, I should probably put the first chapter up in SYW since I had the old first chapter up there and it's changed a lot and I'm a bit concerned about a couple of things and I have to make progress on this.
4) Let's see if I can hit five in a row on the newsletter, shall we? I could always put my short story there.

Go, team!

onesecondglance · May 3, 2018

How did I miss this thread until today? Gah. I'm in as always. Good luck, people!

Saoirse · May 4, 2018

Liz - Good luck with your goals.

OSG - I've done that a few times. S'okay.

Yesterday instead of editing Fireborn I ended up banging my head against the wall on my boss's e-commerce. Specifically product images that are blurry no matter what I do, or what resolution they are. I think I know what the problem might be, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

And I also botched a few pages on her website by accident, did not get fired (she's really cool that way), and I spent nearly 2 hours fixing that. By the time I finished all that, I didn't have the energy to attack Fireborn. Le sigh.

Today will be better. I hope.

Zan75 · May 5, 2018

Hey Liz - Good to see you again. Hope your family stuff settles down quickly and in a good way. Best of luck chipping away at your list for May.

OSG - Good to see you again, how's your project coming?

Saoirse - Nice to see you have an understanding boss and are still employed

Got any freelance jobs lined up for the month?

This past week I got tired of looking at a computer screen. Or rather, I'd stare at it while my mind (unsuccessfully) tried to figure out what to write. So I decided to print out my various projects, grabbed myself a pen, and started reading and turning physical pages. That was more productive and now I'm in the process of transferring those changes back to the computer.

Saoirse · May 5, 2018

Zan75 - Yes, she's awesome.

I do have one so far. Just waiting for him to send me the manuscript. Cool about your productivity. Sometimes a change like that kicks the muse on the butt to start moving.

5 pages last night. Got distracted by Gilmore Girls. Great show! I'm editing right this second. Have done about 25 pages. Hopefully more before our next binge. Which will be sometime tonight.

lizmonster · May 5, 2018

Hi everyone! :hi:

So much for my goal of updating every day.

But I did get Chapter 1 up on Share Your Work, and I was terrified and hid from the internet all day, but I've had some really helpful feedback on it. Feeling a whole lot better about everything, really. Now I just need to make some tweaks!

No real progress on the query letter, though. Those are so much more daunting than plain ol' ordinary fiction.

Go, team!

Hunt & Peck · May 5, 2018

Grrr...May sucks...June will also suck...just a lot of suckiness all around for me.

We just accepted an offer on our house and the closing date is June 15th, so I'll be going crazy between now and then trying to find a place to live and packing up everything we own.

All that means my writing is hitting a monster speed bump. Since my book is about me traveling in the woods, it relies on me actually getting into the woods, which I can't exactly do with so much moving-related things to get done. Still, no excuses, so I'm hoping to at least get some day-hikes knocked out, but no promises. In addition, I need to get the YouTube channel up, as well as a website. I'll go with WordPress since I've built a few websites there in the past, so at least I'm familiar with their platform.

Zan75 · May 6, 2018

Saoisre - Good luck with your continuing edits, hope you don't get to distracted

Liz - Glad you got some good feedback. Hope your tweaks are coming along nicely. (I've decided that I hate query letters)

H&P - Congrats on selling your house, I hope it all goes smoothly for you. I did that a few years ago. You never know, a little break from your writing could be a benefit to the story in the long run.

I'm still slowly plugging away on my previous mentions, but progress is progress.

lizmonster · May 6, 2018

H&P! Your schedule sounds packed for a while. Feel free to vent to us - we love that here.

Go, Zan75! :e2cheer:

I'm working through the query letter exercises and damn this stuff is hard. I'm doing mayqueen's one sentence exercise, and it's been useful, but I can't believe how exhausting it is trying to write one single sentence.

lizmonster · May 7, 2018

Closing in on a draft query letter. I think. One thing I've realized is that I need to tweak the MS a bit to clarify the main conflict. Who'd have thought hair-tearing query letter exercises could be so useful to the actual book?

Zan75 · May 9, 2018

LIZ - Keep it up. Thanks for putting up those query letter links, I found some good stuff along that path.

It's been a pretty dismal start to the month. Not much to show in the way of moving forward. My query letter work has progressed some so not a total fail so far :tongue

Saoirse · May 9, 2018

Hunt & Peck - Hello! Good to see you here.

Good luck with your house and your book.

Liz - That's really cool. Actually, I had the same experience with my brief foray into query writing. I'm about to do another revision on that book, and I decided to get rid of one subplot b/c of the query clarifying things for me.

Zan75 - Hugs on the slow start, but glad your query is progressing.

I'm almost done with the freelance job. Twenty-three more pages to go, then a summary.

Zan75 · May 12, 2018

Hello everyone :hi:

Happy Mother's Day to all the mom's out there.
How's everyone's projects coming along?

I've been a bit under the weather these last few days so nothing new to report. I'm going to try to get a few new words down at some point this weekend. Wish me luck.

Zan75 · May 14, 2018

Added about 750 new words today. Felt like progress.

Hope everyone else is doing well as we near May's halfway point.

lizmonster · May 14, 2018

Rough day in a lot of ways, including some pretty discouraging feedback. Not sure I should bother with this anymore, but what else am I going to do with it? Sigh. Well, I submitted it to the beta project, so maybe someone will find something positive there.

Brechin Frost · May 14, 2018

Hello Everyone--

I'm in editing mode. Today, I edited 500 words of my novel by a bonfire and tonight started on the early stages of planning a new book.

The big news for me is that I published a novelette and had a job interview for a job to write a series of historical non-fiction short stories for the historical society in a nearby town as part of a government grant. It went really well despite my nervousness and intense social anxiety. Hopefully I get it because I think it could be a rewarding experience.

It's been a while since I've been here, but I'm glad to see everyone still hard a work.

I didn't write anything today and that bothers me. It's actually been a couple... a few days... no, a week... since I wrote anything. Pretty soon I'm going to start having the super-vivid dreams that I get when I deprive myself of any other creative outlet.

onesecondglance · May 15, 2018

Zan!

Saoirse!

Hunt & Peck!

Great work on the publication, Brechin Frost! I hope you get that job.

Liz, you hang in there, okay? Take a break if you need to. :Hug2:

It's been a while since I checked in, mainly because I've been trying to ignore the fact I've not made any progress... :gone:

But... my big news is that (deep breath) I GOT INTO THE MASTERS COURSE I APPLIED FOR!!! :e2woo:

I start in September, and as part of the course I will have to write a new book. So the new target is to get the current book ready for betas by September so I can make a clean start. Yikes, that's really not very far away...

Saoirse · May 15, 2018

SUPER CONGRATS OSG!

Brechin Frost, good to see you again and good luck with the possible job!

Liz - Hugs. That's brutal.

Zan75 - Nice progress!

I've been slowly chipping away at the Fireborn edits. I'm about 80% in. I have a few new scenes to write.

lizmonster · May 15, 2018

onesecondglance said:
But... my big news is that (deep breath) I GOT INTO THE MASTERS COURSE I APPLIED FOR!!!

onesecondglance · May 16, 2018

Zan75 · May 16, 2018

Congrats Brechin and OSG, fantastic accomplishments for both of you. :partyguy:

Hang in there Liz!

Saoirse - Great work on Fireborn :Thumbs:

I've been working on some editing stuff. I think I figured out how to merge two sections together so I'm feeling better about that project.

Mirthful May - 500 words/day editing/writing - all genres welcome!

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

Mi verkas

Mi verkas

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

pretending to be awake

Mi verkas

Mi verkas

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

Mi verkas

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

pretending to be awake

Mi verkas

Possibly A Mermaid Queen

pretending to be awake