2008/2009 End of Financial Year Round-Up

Happy End of Financial Year!

I thought I'd list my (slightly embarrassing) writing achievements of the past year:

• Writing School Assignments Submitted: 4


• Short Stories Submitted: 8


• Short Stories Accepted/Published: 2


• Writing Competitions Entered: 3 (1 flash fiction, 1 novel writing, 1 NaNoWriMo)


• Chapters of Fan Fiction Posted: 4

What can you tell from the above? That I've been slack in doing any writing?
What you don't see are the half-written stories, the rough outlines that are just looking for that magic part to pull the whole thing together, and the ideas that are floating around in my head.

I look foward to a more productive 2009/2010!

In The Door

Blurry eyes. Painful head. An unproductive day at work. But at least I managed to send off my novel to the Get Your Stiletto in the Door competition last night.

Now, I'm worrying. Have I sent it to the wrong e-mail address? Did they get it in time? I guess I won't know.

I've noticed that they've extended the competition's closing date from June 15 to June 20. They must have changed it yesterday, because I only saw it just before I was about to submit my entry (and I'd visited the site that morning to double-check the submission guidelines).

Five more days, I told myself. In five days, you could make your novel actually read like a novel's supposed to. You could actually make it not 'crap'!

But I had to submit it. I'd spent too much time editing and re-writing over the weekend, and lost too many hours of sleep (I was asleep from 11pm - 4am on Friday night, and then had a wonderfully invigorating sleep on Saturday night from 11:30pm - 1:45am), to continue in the same way this week.

So I had to submit it. At 11:00pm last night, only an hour and a half after I'd planned.

Now all I have to do is work on my other stories and wait for August to read my feedback!

Novel meltdown

I have one week. One week left to edit the first thirty pages of my novel (formerly known as NaNoWriMo Novel #1, now called by its acronym, TBW) so I can submit it to The 2009 Get Your Stiletto In The Door Contest. I had every intention of entering it into the competition this time last year, but I looked at the state of my novel and said 'There is no way it will be ready in time.'

At the moment, it's pretty much there. I cut a lot of the ideas that were purely NaNoWriMo padding, and re-structured the whole book. And I also had to divide the whole thing up into chapters. I think it's more balanced. I'm just line editing now, making sure that the scenes flow easily from one to the next, and that my characterisation and description isn't too over/underdone.

It would be nice for my novel to do well in the competition - I'd be ecstatic for months if it did - but realistically I'm more interested in the feedback the judges are offering. Hopefully they will give me pointers on things I can improve, so that I can make my novel better.

P.S. Happy Queen's Birthday to all of the states who celebrate it today! I hope you enjoy the day off! I know I will :)

P.P.S. I've noticed lately that I use the word 'just' a lot. I'm trying to stop! Is there any word that always seems to just pop up in your writing?

The Writer's Retreat

It is just after eight o'clock, and I am just about ready to begin writing. All around me is quiet, save for the chirping of some unidentifiable birds outside and the hum of the computer fan.

It is Monday morning, I have this week off from work, and I intend to write.

The next eight days (Monday June 8 is a public holiday) will be spent slowly striking things off of my long list of writing projects. And not before time - some of them have been hanging around for a year.

My first task is to finish three chapters of Retribution, my Ever After Fan Fiction story. From there comes the more difficult work: sequencing my novel and starting rewrites to get it ready for a novel competition I plan on entering it into, polishing another submission I want to make to an online journal, and trying to find a publication that matches another story I've written (I know, I know, I should find the publication first, and then tailor my stories for them. I must get my head around that concept!)

Wish me luck!