Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Same Bat-Channel, Fewer Bat-Times.

Well, slightly different bat-time-- though it's been a while since I was a regular 8 am poster. I'm not doing so well at the blogginess lately. And if I rework my priorities, I'm not sure where blogging will fall in the bunch. Especially when I'm so far from being published right now.

Obviously, when I rewrote my daily schedule for having both children home, it got left out. Accidentally, of course, but still..... My first finished novel isn't quite so finished as I thought. (Thank you to the agents who read and provided the helpful feedback.) I haven't finished another and instead have been meandering through a small stack of short stories. I've taken time off for reading binges and planning activities with the children. Writing time gets infringed upon by blood tests and doctor visits. It's always the first thing to get cancelled because it's the easiest thing to lose. (The children, for me they don't just go away when they are smelly or inconvenient, like they do on so many tv shows. -- The husband is better at that, but still, for some reason, thinks we should occasionally spend time together.)

Anyway, blogging will probably be the thing to go in my possibly over-planned summer schedule. Not entirely gone. I'll still check in with the odd thought (like I have for the last few weeks), but I don't see myself getting back to the originally planned work-week scheduled posts. Especially with the goal of submitting short stories to publishers and magazines to start slow in the building a name for myself. That means I can't stick them all up here when I think of them. I've got to rethink them and try to figure out where to send them instead. (That's why my Character Sketch and Random Writing days haven't been short story style for a while. I've gotten a little lost coming up with so many new ideas at once.)

I'll still post something, but less often. Only a few times each week. I'll have to figure out what though. Shall I stick with Weekly Updates? Helpful for me, (in the admitting out loud to others my lack of progress -- like weight watchers for writing) but probably boring for you. This Writer's Life? I'm a little bit broken and a little bit boring. Really, how interesting is that? The fun part was the shorts and I've taken them away to try to focus my creativity elsewhere right now.

I could jump into contests like other bloggers, but the books I collect tend to be older garage sale collected items and not nearly so exciting as their brand new writer signed copies. I keep thinking I should make another cloth dragon and offer it up, but thats another time and creativity issue, no easier than a short story -- though that one wouldn't require one each week.

Publishing advice? I'm not published -- well, except the two short stories with Crossed Genres. I don't feel that my advice would be particularly useful. I could list the people I follow, but only once. I tend to be sort of staid in that.

Kid stuff? If the goal is publishing fiction, kid stuff is sort of out of the blue and people can visit me on facebook for that, where I'm more a family person and less a writer.

Book reviews? I've already decided I can't do that. I'm quite picky about my books and it is not as rare as I might like for me to fling a book across the room in frustration or annoyance. It is entirely unprofessional to badmouth your co-workers and worse to badmouth people you are hoping will eventually be your co-workers -- in a broad universal sense or, I guess in a specific editor directed anthology sense. Even if I hated their books, I have complete respect for the accomplishment of not only writing a book, but making their way through the submission and rejection process. Obviously it worked for someone and I occasionally have problems with even my favorites -- especially when I learn something that makes something that happened in the book not very possible.

So, my goal is to plan out a few days of specific purpose posts and try to stick with it. Maybe a Monday, Thursday schedule instead of daily. I'll get there. If you follow and have particular things you might want to hear about, now would be the time to speak up.

Thanks,
Marilou

1 comment:

  1. Sorry, I got nothing. I have a hard enough time thinking of posts for myself. ^_^ If it's about writing in any way, I'll read it.

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