A New Year

I haven't blogged for quite some time. My eldest started school, I've been sick with a constant cycle of colds, and I've been watching two of my nephews during the week. So my life has become very busy with non-writing things.

However, writing things are happening as well.

So back in October, I read what little response I got from the people who agreed to read through my book (I gave them a month and one hadn't even looked at it and the other two had read only a small portion). In the future, I may try to find less busy people to give me feedback, although the feedback I did get was greatly appreciated.

Anyway, in October I finished my edits, wrote my query, and emailed a bunch of agents. A week after sending them all out, I had an epiphany about how to make my book a thousand times better.

Which is good, since I've received lots of polite rejections as the months have gone by.

I'm drastically changing my novel. It used to be a two perspective story, and now it is only from one point of view. I think it will work a lot better, and hopefully agents will think so too when I'm ready to query them all once more.

I now have three solid book ideas outside of what I'm working on, so that's exciting. And frustrating, since I'll be doing some mundane task like taking a shower or folding laundry, and I'll picture an entire, wonderful scene in my head for one of these books that I'm not currently working on. But I'm forcing myself to simply outline the ideas, and stay on task with writing the one I've started.

I got stuck at the beginning of December. I knew I wanted this chapter from the previous version, and I had added it into the book and it just wasn't sitting right. I finally figured out what was wrong and have added two chapters before it, and now all is well again. I'm about to begin the chapters that are incorporating the point of view I've eliminated from this version, so that will be fun. Although I expect it will be difficult to eliminate so much of what I had written, but I recognize that I need to cut it down significantly for it to work from the other character's point of view.

I wrote the first version of this book from October 2013 until October 2014. So I'm hoping to complete this version at the same rate, and hopefully have the first draft and perhaps some other drafts finished by the time 2015 ends.

I'm looking forward to another year of writing!