Well, fooey…

September 14, 2012August 22, 20142 Comments

Oil Painting Workspace (Photo credit: nimbu)

I know I promised an exciting (Ha! :)) photo essay on repainting Tomcat’s room for today’s Photo Friday post, but the thing is, well…we’re not done. Oh, I’ve got a few before pictures, and we’ve got two coats of primer on the ceiling, plus a coat of paint and three coats of paint on the walls and two coats of paint on the radiator (I won’t be sorry to see that thing go as soon as we can afford to redo our heating and lack of cooling system). But the plastic is still on the bed and the floor, the tape is still on the light fixtures and the woodwork, and every night this week, we’ve looked at that wallpaper border and sighed with exhaustion. Also loathing. Maybe even a few other things.

So with no pretty, pretty after pictures to show off, I’m going to wait on that post-bedroom-remodeling post I had planned. Seymour wants to get the border put up Sunday, so maybe one day next week, I’ll get it done. That sounds like a nice, reasonably distant time.

Meanwhile, today is the day for the entries to fly in the agent pitch contest for GUTGAA (short for Gearing Up To Get An Agent). My entry didn’t make it into the morning pitch session, which literally filled up in seconds. Amazingly, we didn’t break Gmail. 🙂 The afternoon session starts in mere minutes. I had my finger hovering over the send button on my email this morning and my eye on the clock; I hit send as soon the clock hit 11:00 a.m. (well, 10:00 a.m. here), but I was just a bit too slow. Hopefully the afternoon session won’t be quite as crazy as the morning. There are 200 available slots; 100 remain as of this moment.

Okay, I just hit send. Let the waiting begin.

THIS JUST IN: I MADE THE CUT!!!

I repeat…

September 10, 201210 Comments

Dear God, I think I’m going to die. I need a good long soak in a nice hot bath. And a nap. It should last a week or two. And perhaps a full-body massage. That ought to put me on the mend.

That is all. 😀

She’s a-gone!

August 26, 201222 Comments

That’s it! I’ve finished! Yes, that’s right, again, I’ve finally finished again. But this time I mean it. I just hit send on an email to someone who requested my full manuscript. So now I really am done. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go breathe into a brown paper bag for a bit and then maybe read a book. For fun!

I know, I’m such a party girl. 😛

To the writing cave!

August 23, 201217 Comments

Once again, I’m hunkered down, making revisions. Once again, I spy a light at the end of the tunnel. I know I’ve said this about a dozen times, but I’ve entered the homestretch and man, does it feel good!

So forgive the sparseness of my posts of late. I hope to be back to something approaching normal sometime soon. 🙂

The importance of proofreading

August 20, 201213 Comments

So I’ve been proofreading my novel before sending it out into the wide world on a full request from a query. It’s a good thing, too, because last night, on the verge of sleep, I found a large, economy-sized error. This was the kind of error that made me cringe in terror, the kind of error that, had I not found it prior to sending out my manuscript, would have caused me to actually pull hair out of my head. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the stuff of which nightmares are made.

This error was more than a little typo, more than a minor spellcheck oversight. I had done some major rearranging of text and failed to delete the redundancies at one point, but then thought I had it all taken care of. I happily went about printing off my final hard copy and set to reading through it, making a note of each instance where something needed to be fixed (and I’m not talking about instances where I decided that something sounded better if I wrote it differently – I’m talking about instances like where I said witting instead of sitting or considering when I meant consider).

Then I discovered that Chapter 13 needed to be deleted.

Not just a portion of it, oh, no. The whole thing had to go. I was falling asleep reading because I was absolutely exhausted, yet I was awake enough to realize that I had just read the opening to Chapter 13 ten minutes earlier…in Chapter 11. I flipped quickly through Chapter 13, then back through the three preceding chapters and discovered that Chapter 13 contained parts of Chapters 10, 11, and 12. Talk about en epic facepalm.

Prior to this discovery, I’d been considering just winging the whole proofing bit. I knew there were a couple of places that I needed to hammer out a bit more, but I thought that once I got those straightened out, I could probably just give it a rest and then send it on in. Boy, am I glad I talked myself out of that idea! Part of me is really anxious to get this whole proofing project done with because I’m impatient, but fortunately the logical side of me is louder and knows that I need to take my time and do it right. Yay logic! 🙂

And now, back to the grindstone. I’ve got some more polishing to do.

Spelling and Grammar Count (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)
Partying with Punctuation (dodgingcommas.wordpress.com)

Holy cannoli, Batman, I’ve finished!

August 7, 201212 Comments

That’s right, I’ve finished the revisions! Again! For good (I hope)! And now, a stats breakdown, because I’ve been staring at spreadsheets all day and decided to do one of my own because my spreadsheets are better:

Final word count (excluding chapter headings, title page, and header info): 101,561
Final page count: 356
Average number of words per page: 285.28

Once again, I’ve printed a hard copy to look over before I get it sent off. Seymour has graciously offered to go over it for me, and I hope he’ll find the time to do it before next year because he is an excellent editor. He just has even less time than me. *sigh*

I could do with a nap in one of these right now!
Photo courtesy of Jessie Harrell via WANA Commons

So tonight, now that all my hard work is done (I hope), I’m going to leave my laptop turned off, pop in a lovely Disney movie, and spend some time with my long-suffering family. They deserve it, I deserve it, and more importantly, my brain needs a rest! Of course, I could always amuse myself by trolling the internet for fun things to post on the ’90s Kid Facebook page. That’s always a fun time! Incidentally, if the nostalgia bug hasn’t bitten you yet, check it out. You may wind up with a severe case. I know I have! 🙂

Okay, time to go. Must load up with good food, good tunes, good drinks, and good rest! After all, I’ve got another vacation coming up, and as anyone who’s followed my previous vacation posts already knows, I’ll be in serious need of a vacation to recover from it, so I had better rest while I can. Happy Tuesday, y’all! ♥

Are you extraordinary?

July 21, 201215 Comments

Photo by Kay Kauffman

We can be the heroes and heroines in our own lives. We can set out upon a quest. We can write our own stories, and within those tales, discover something extraordinary. We can have an extraordinary life. -Tricia Drammeh

I read that about an hour ago and was inspired. This post almost didn’t get published today, but I’ve still got ten more minutes to go before the weekend is officially here and I think I can make it! Anyway, Tricia is a wonderful lady and I highly recommend visiting her blog, where you can find the rest of the post that I quoted above.

Anyway, it’s late, I’m tired, I’ve got boatloads of work to do, and I’ve recently become addicted to Pottermore. If you’re there, let’s be friends! I’m SkyKey6037 and just got sorted into Hufflepuff tonight, so that was pretty cool, although I have to admit I was hoping for either Gryffindor or Ravenclaw. Oh, well.

And now, to the writing cave! Happy weekend, y’all!

Caffeine system failure in three…two…one…

July 9, 20126 Comments

After a weekend spent mostly offline, I have finally almost caught up with everything that happened online over the weekend. I still have a ton of reading to catch up on, but other than that, I think I’ve managed to update myself on all things social. Maybe.

Zzzz.

I seem to be suffering from some serious sleep deprivation, though, as I can barely keep my eyes open. I barricaded myself in my room over the weekend with the a/c, my writing supplies, no internet, and plenty of caffeine so that I could get some work done on The Lokana Chronicles. My wonderful Seymour kindly took care of Cricket and Thumper and left me alone for the better part of 48 hours, but sadly, I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I wanted. I made lots of progress, I just didn’t meet my goal, which was admittedly steep.

But! I feel like the progress I did make will vastly improve the story and it really felt wonderful to be writing again. Aside from blogging, I haven’t done much writing lately and I’ve missed it. It was mentally exhausting trying to figure out how to flesh out my story without making it seem like I was just throwing in a lot of filler, but the results are worth it, in my humble opinion (at least, I hope so).

And now, I must be getting back to the grindstone. My posts may be a bit more sporadic over the next couple of weeks; between revising The Lokana Chronicles and preparing for our next family camping adventure (coming this weekend to a campground near you!), I will be offline quite a bit for the next little while. But don’t worry – I’ll make sure to fill you in on all the adventures we have, as I’m sure there will be plenty!

Have a great week!

Excitement abounds!

July 5, 20128 Comments

You know, I’ve had something brewing in the back of my mind for quite a while now as a blog topic and some of the posts I’ve been reading lately on T.L. Tyson’s blog have more or less cemented the idea in my head. However, I’m not sure it’s fully fermented yet and at any rate, I received an email over my lunch break that pretty much blew said idea sky-high. Any thoughts I might have otherwise entertained posting about today were blown to smithereens when I read the following words:

…I’d love to see the whole thing…

Squee!

Taking time…and kicking guilt in the keister

May 16, 2012Leave a comment

I sat down to work on this post last night after a hectic couple of hours and ended up reading the news on msnbc.com instead. Whoops.

Anyway, I read a fantastic post the other day on Kristen Lamb’s blog about taking time to rest and how there is a season to everything under the sun. Yes, I know Ecclesiastes says the exact same thing, but Ms. Lamb said it in regards to writing by quoting the Byrds and the song “Turn, Turn, Turn.” By the way, I love that song. The melody is beautiful and would be playing in my head were it not for whatever is playing on the radio and distracting me (I know the song, I just can’t think of its name – “Angel Eyes” perhaps? – and I couldn’t tell you who sings it for the life of me). The comparisons she draws between farming and writing are obvious, yet they’d never occurred to me before (despite having grown up in America’s breadbasket, where I still currently live). Her words struck a particular chord with me as I’ve been dealing with quite a lot of guilt lately concerning a variety of tasks that seem to go undone despite my best intentions to accomplish them. To everything there is a season (turn, turn, turn)…