Good News

My fourth submission was accepted! Yay!

Writing on the bus - can it be done?

I've started catching the bus to and from work in an effort to avoid paying high petrol prices. This has two immediate benefits: 1) I'll save an estimated $14 (Australian) a week and 2) I have two more hours each day to get stuff done in (as long as whatever it is can be done sitting in a bus crammed with sixty strangers).

At the moment, I'm taking the novels I've borrowed from the library and reading them. However, I've been reading other people's blogs who say that they actually get writing done when they're on the bus/train etc. This sounds like a good idea, however I'm too worried at the moment about people trying to read over my shoulder what I'm writing to be able to write on the bus. That, and the way the bus driver feels the need to violently test the law of inertia at each bus stop wouldn't help my writing (I could poke someone in the eye with my pen. They could sue me).

I'll just stick with reading on the bus now. Then I'll see how brave I am with getting out my notepad and pen.

Done, done, done!

Even more success: I have just sent off my story to the editor of Getting Hitched! This is big news for me, since I've been blogging about the fact that I was going to submit some work for over two weeks now, and this morning I have finally achieved something.

Now I just have to sit back and wait for a response!

While I do that, I guess it's on to Submission #5 ...

Three Hours to Success

Are you ready for this? It's almost three o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, and I have to get ready for work in three hours.

It's also the last day an online magazine I plan on submitting to is accepting submissions. I have written nine hundred words of a story that is sort of okay but needs a lot of editing in order to get up to a standard I'd be happy with.

So there you have it. In three hours, I hope to be pressing 'Submit' on my e-mail, and seeing my story whizz off into cyberspace (It won't whiz anywhere, actually. It will travel in nice packets. Eek, sounding geeky. This proves that I should not be up this early, and should be sleeping. But I seem to have some kind of temporary insomnia, so you'll have to put up with it).

See you in three hours' time to tell you how I went (please, please let it be good news!).

One Step At A Time

I think I'm one of those people who plan too far ahead. In my head, I keep thinking you have to write this story, and then there's your next Writing School Assignment, and you need to spend more time editing your novel - and Fan Fiction - you need to post more of that story - the reviews make you want to keep writing! That's basically what the voice in my head says. On and on and on about the things I have to do.

Starting now, I will ignore the list of things to do. I will pick one, and then focus solely on that until it's finished. And then choose another one. And on it will go, until I wake up one day and find that I've completed everything that was on my list. And hopefully I will stop stressing myself out about things I really don't need to be stressing out about.

A Massive Undertaking

Why am I online at 2am?

Well, I just woke up and felt like writing! Hooray! So, since I'm awake, I'm going to read through Submission #4 a few times to make sure it sounds perfect, and then submit it before the Internet has a chance to go down again.

And then on to this week's list of tasks. Notice how daunting they are? By next Sunday, I expect myself to submit Submissions 4,5 and 6, have least got a start on 7, 8 and 9, and have thought about what kind of story I'm going to write for Writing School Assignment Seventeen. That's a lot for seven days. Especially for me.

But if I stay in the writing mood I am in at the moment, I'll be fine (as long as I keep my caffeine intake up)!

When the Internet goes down

One of the things I listed to do this week was enter a competition Allen and Unwin were holding to win a manuscript assessment. And I had sat down and written and re-written the one hundred words which explained why my manuscript "stood out from the rest". Most of my time this week has been spent thinking of reasons that don't sound cliched and predictable.

So I had finished my entry, and was just about to connect to the Internet to e-mail it to Allen and Unwin, when the ISP's host computer was down, and so I couldn't connect to the Net (we live in the Dark Ages and still rely on dial-up). Which meant I couldn't submit my competition entry, because now the competition has closed!

Why won't I submit?

I have completed my fourth submission (Yay me!). It's sitting there, in the folder on my computer, just waiting to go out into the big wide world and see what it can do. It should be attached to an e-mail right now, sitting in the inbox of the editor I intend to send it to (That's bad grammar. It should probably read: the editor to whom I intend to send it - but that doesn't sound right to me). But it's not. Why am I so afraid to submit my work? Is it fear of rejection? Fear that my story's not good enough? I give myself until the end of tomorrow, two weeks after I first said I was going to submit it. Otherwise I will never get anywhere with my writing!

Salvaging my NaNoWriMo novel

Has anyone who's won NaNoWriMo actually taken the time to complete their novel?

I did NaNoWriMo for the first time last year, and somehow managed to write most of the 50,000 words in the last two weeks of November, encouraged by my mum who believed I could win it, and wanting to prove my dad wrong, because he thought that there was no way I could get that many words done in the time I had left to write them in. I finished NaNoWriMo at around 10:30 p.m. on the 30th November.

But since then I've been editing it on and off, including adding missing scenes and getting the novel up to a respectable novel-length of about 85,000 words. While I've been editing, I've noticed one thing: you can tell that the novel was written for NaNoWriMo.

Extraneous words are everywhere. Why say something in three words, when you can say it in ten and get a higher word count? That seems to be the approach I've taken. And to write that many words in two weeks, I guess I pretty much had to.

I think NaNoWriMo was good for getting a decent start on my novel, and for showing me that I could sit down and write if there was a deadline and enough pressure from the people around me (where's that dedication now?). For this year's NaNoWriMo, I think I'll concentrate on the quality of my writing, as well as the word count, and managing my time so I have the full four weeks of November to write in, so that when it comes to editing post-November, I'll have a better starting point than I did with last year's novel!

Leading a horse to water...

There's that saying: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

That's exactly how I feel at the moment. I'm here, in front of the computer, writing, and yet not working on my stories.

Why, brain, why can't you motivate yourself to get something done?

On a positive note, Assignment #16 came back yesterday, and my tutor said that I had written a very professional book review, so that's good!