AN UPDATE

Two agents have asked to read my manuscript. They've had it for about a month now and, as always, I am impatient.

In the meantime, I am about halfway through my latest novel. And I'm working my way up to 100 books read this year as well. I just finished book #97.

Now I just have to choose a 98th.

Query Updates

Total Queries Sent: 19
Queries Sent Today: 5
Rejections: 6
Requests for Full: 0

:/

The thing is, some of these I sent over a month and a half ago. I realize that agents are very, very busy people, but I'd rather get a form rejection (as much as I frown on them) than not hear anything at all.

Back to work on my new WIP. Tentatively titled THE AFTER. Apparently I like THE in the title lately. Ha.

5 October 2009

Tonight I went with a friend to one of her writing groups. I've never been in a writing group, just attended writing workshops with school. And there's a certain atmosphere in a class, a different one than just a group of people getting together to write and read and discuss.

It's because I don't have a support group. I don't have anyone around to read and respond to my work. Everyone I ask is busy with their own things. I know this. So I toyed with the idea of finding a writing group but I didn't pursue it. So when Kathy asked me to join her group to help a YA writer with her piece, I said yes.

The group tonight was small but diverse. The girl whose piece we were workshopping didn't come, so we just did a writing exercise and shared our responses after a half hour. It was really great to listen to everyone else's writing, what we all came up with in 35 minutes.

The prompt?
Tell your favorite story / fairy tale from a different perspective.

Writing Status Update

THE MOONSTONE total word count: 53,650
STATUS: complete. always revising.

QUERIES SENT: 14
REJECTIONS RECEIVED: 5
FULLS REQUESTED: 0
SYNOPSIS STATUS: drafted, unrevised.

--

THE AFTER total word count: 7,136
STATUS: incomplete

DAILY WORD COUNT 10/1: 1,226

Just an update for my own records.

Litterbox Magazine

Litterbox Magazine, the online literary and lifestyle magazine that I work on, has a write-up in Chapman University's Panther newspaper. You can find the October 1 article here.

It's a great article and I'm really excited.

If you haven't checked out Litterbox Magazine yet, you totally should.

Writer's Block

I wrote an article for Every Girl Blog about writer's block. You can find it here. I hope it helps.

Incidentally, I am suffering from a massive case of it myself. Perhaps I ought to take my own advice to heart, yeah?

A writing exercise

I picked up A Writer's Book of Days again. I said I would try the writing prompts / exercises in it every day since the writing isn't happening. Well, I did one today, which I'm not going to share. But I am going to share one I wrote on January 4. I don't know what year, but that was the date.

"A year after your death..." (after Czeslaw Miloss)

A year after your death, I started visiting my grandmother. She lived along in a small apartment on the other side of town, and I went to her every day after school. I brought her a vanilla latte from Starbucks and she made me white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Her apartment smelled like lilacs and I was afraid to sit on the couch. She stopped asking me to move from the floor. I stayed until Oprah came on, roughly twenty-four to twenty-nine minutes, depending on how much traffic I ran into by the mall. She asked me about my day, about my favorite moment. Usually my favorite moments were childish ones--hot, French fries in the cafeteria or a boy smiling at me in the hallway. She never told me her favorite moment but I bet it was when I showed up. One time she had a cat in the apartment. She said she'd found it scratching at the door that morning so she'd fed it warm milk and tuna fish and asked me to post flyers that said she'd found a car. We made a few together that afternoon and I hung them up on the telephone poles near her place on my way out. The next day the cat was gone but she kept a saucer of water outside her door for at least a week after.