First Steps

Besides writing writing writing, I'm trying to get my stories organized. I have over 60 stories, mostly incomplete, sitting in my writing file. Some are terrible and will never see the light of day, some are my guilty pleasures I keep coming back to work on, and the rest are a mixture of good, bad and ugly that might be publishable. Maybe. Some day. Today's first step is to organize them in some way besides the terrible file names I used to "describe" them. Seriously- Cage? What the hell is that? There's not even a cage in the damn story!

Currently my focus is on a rough novella, a first draft novel that is being edited by a gracious friend, and a couple of possible short stories. I have another novel in the works, which is what I'm sitting down and working on until I get the first novel back in between editing the novella and short stories. And I've got 3 different story lines in my head right now, fighting it out to see who can hold my attention long enough to get it out in ink. The problem with those story lines are that sometimes they hold up once out of my head and sometimes they don't, so I let them bounce around inside my skull until I'm sure they have enough permanence to last past the first five pages.

It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. I just to need to not let it overwhelm me. The friend who is editing my first novel has already given me some great ideas to rework it, and that was just from talking with her for five minutes. I'm really excited to get back to it, but I'm going to wait until she's done with it. The novella I haven't touched in close to a year so I should have fresh eyes on it. Tomorrow (make that today looking at the time) I'll start the editing on that.

Accountability

My adventure in Beaverton meeting Lili St. Crow, Ilona Andrews and her husband Gordon, and Devon Monk has inspired me. I met a ton of amazing women there who have published and were just regular, every day women with families and kids, doing their writing for various reasons. But all of them had this in common- they made their writing their job. When they had free time they wrote, they wrote every day whether they felt like it or not, and to get published they TRIED. They didn't just sit around expecting it happen. They waded through hundreds of rejection letters until finally they got that one acceptance.

That's what I want to do.

The problem is I'm terrible at actualizing my dreams unless I'm held accountable by other people. By doing a blog announcing what I am doing and why, I have the potential to be accountable to a ton more people- though even if it was just five it would get me going. The writing part isn't the issue (though I definitely want to buckle down and write at least 200 words every day), it's the trying part of getting publishing knowing I have a high degree of failure ahead of me. But that's okay. That's what everyone goes through. This blog would be a way to remind myself of that.