#Writemotivation End of Jan/Goals for Feb.

January 28, 2013 at 8:00 am (#WriteMotivation)

1. Keep up on crits.- ALMOST done with Chy’s. Rather, I should say, I gave her the best advice I could on it, so far, and will basically call it done once I finish this readthrough and don’t find anything else to pick at other than line level tightening.
2. Send SW to betas.-Done. Got it to them last Monday. Now the waiting, since they’re both crazy busy too. (First round’s only 2 people, but they do an AMAZING job and have saved me many embarrassments over the years!) Between life/work/kid/hubbies/moving houses/etc on their ends, in various combinations, I don’t expect to get SW back any time soon. Once I have a timeline on when I expect that back, I’ll bug those who are the second round to make sure they’ve got time. That round I expect much quicker, because it’s far simpler edits.
3. Apply to at least 30 jobs, at least 5 of those in publishing.
4. Work on Top Hat.- Wrote ~5 pages at work this week, on breaks and during overly repetitive powerpoints. Finally got to the part where things really start lining up, might need to fiddle with the pacing anyway when it’s done. But oh, this chapter!
5. Secret project- Still writing posts while waiting on server side stuff. Not entirely sure when it’s going to launch, so doing what I can now.

Ok, so January, pretty damned good. I would have liked to finish crits for chy, but maybe I’ll still sneak under the wire on that. We’ll see. Depends on if I can find reading time early this week. All in all though? That’s the only one I can criticize myself on, so I’m happy with that. The other things are either done, or at least SOME progress made.

So, onwards to Feb!
February’s goals:
1. Keep up on crits!-Don’t think I’ll have many of these this month, but just in case.
2. Walk to work at least 4/5 days each week– Given as I even walked home in a snowstorm on Friday, I expect I won’t need that exception often. Here’s the thing: Mass transit sorta grosses me out. There are weird people who always want to start conversations with me, and who knows WHAT strange diseases/germs they leave around. Parking near my work is stupidly expensive. It’s only 1.5 miles, and I need the exercise anyway, so I’m bribing myself. Every week I walk to work, I can get a book. Physical or ebook, either way. ~$10 a book, (Between various club cards and such, I even snagged the hardcover of The Archived this week for roughly that! I was a very happy camper!), still cheaper than even a day’s parking in the attached garage. Leaving myself a freebie for one day in case it’s too miserable to walk, or in case of injury or something.
3. Get to 50k on Top Hat– I told myself I wasn’t allowed to read CE Murphy’s Baba Yaga’s Daughter until I did this. It taunts me. I WANT to read this book, and that’s only 15-20k for this month. I want to balance writing/work. We’ll see. I still need to type in what I’m doing by hand and update the counter.
4. Read at least 15 books-This is easier than it sounds, as there’s a trip to LA in here, and two very long flights. I might even get more than that done, but I don’t want to burn out.

February’s going to be an long month for as short as it is. We’ll be out of town (and likely mostly offline) from 2/8 to 2/12 for a cousin’s wedding in LA. Work already said that’d be no problem, which is SO nice compared to my old job. We had to really fight to get days off there. This place seems to be cake with days off, as long as you let them know in advance, you’re good. After this week, I’ll be on the later shift, noon-8, which means I’m out of the house (with walking time) 11-9. But on the plus side, I have writing time in the morning, and still have a little time at night to wind down. While we’re out, they’re going to replace/reseal part of the floor that got screwed up from an incident before we moved in with a minor leak.

I don’t think I’ll get the crits back on SW in Feb. There’s so much else going on in both of their lives right now, and it’s not like I’m on a deadline. I’m guesstimating April. I’d love if I could get it sooner, but I’m not going to worry about it. Consider it practice for all the waiting involved in publishing. Though I did tweet once during Pitch Madness just for curiosity. One of the other editors at Entangled wants to see it, though I don’t really know if it’d be a good fit there. The romance is a driving force, but it’s not as primary as my tweet (in retrospect) made it sound… But it amused me, since I’ve been interning for another editor there. I might submit anyway. I need to make a query letter anyway. I was hoping to do that this weekend, but I got busy with all sorts of other things. Oops!