What I Learned While I Wasn’t Doing Anything Important
August 25th is my self-imposed deadline for completing my first manuscript.
Are you laughing yet? Because you totally should be. I’m only one-third of the way through my plot. Am I going to pound out 50,000 words in 15 days? Not likely.
You may be wondering why I’m so far behind. The answer is simple. I went on vacation for four weeks. When I planned this vacation I intended to work on my manuscript every day. Instead of writing a book, I read fifteen others. Yep. That’s a lot of books.
The good news is that all this reading paid off in a big way. I kept track of all the devices (The Hourglass Door), vocabulary (Knight and Rouge), plots, scene settings (House of Night), character arcs (Gone). I learned that it’s okay to dump a whole lot of backstory into a chapter, if the timing is right (Raven’s Gate).
I gained a pretty good understanding of what is marketable now and why those books are selling.
Slap my mouth for saying it, but I don’t write simply for the enjoyment of it. I write because I want to be published. I may have totally failed at getting the words out of my head and onto the page, but hopefully all this reading moved me toward the “published” part of my goal.
Are you laughing yet? Because you totally should be. I’m only one-third of the way through my plot. Am I going to pound out 50,000 words in 15 days? Not likely.
You may be wondering why I’m so far behind. The answer is simple. I went on vacation for four weeks. When I planned this vacation I intended to work on my manuscript every day. Instead of writing a book, I read fifteen others. Yep. That’s a lot of books.
The good news is that all this reading paid off in a big way. I kept track of all the devices (The Hourglass Door), vocabulary (Knight and Rouge), plots, scene settings (House of Night), character arcs (Gone). I learned that it’s okay to dump a whole lot of backstory into a chapter, if the timing is right (Raven’s Gate).
I gained a pretty good understanding of what is marketable now and why those books are selling.
Slap my mouth for saying it, but I don’t write simply for the enjoyment of it. I write because I want to be published. I may have totally failed at getting the words out of my head and onto the page, but hopefully all this reading moved me toward the “published” part of my goal.
