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.