What Am I Doing?

In case I’ve been unclear as to my game plan for HIRAETH, I’m letting it sit for at least two weeks, and my goal is to have it finished and ready for querying by the end of January. That could change. My beta readers could find some huge, glaring flaws, which wouldn’t be the end of the world. But January 31st is my current plan.

Which begs the question: Liz, what are you doing right now?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Actually, I have a fair amount of writing I hope to get done before January fifteenth, which is weird, because when I finished my draft several days ago, I pictured myself sitting around with not a whole lot to do, slowly becoming more and more neurotic.

Let’s start with my most exciting goal. I would like to finish an 8-11,000 word rough draft/outline hybrid for my new creepy space story, which I will reference again very soon. I’ll set it aside while I’m finishing HIRAETH, so I would like to have it at that natural point where I would be taking a break from it anyway. In theory, 8-11,000 words is a very manageable goal for me, and anyway, I don’t want to drag out this part of the process. Mainly, I just want to have something solid to occupy my brain space so I don’t go crazy while I’m querying.

Additionally, there are several blog posts I want to draft and several more I want to edit. I have two others besides this one that I would like to post over the next couple days, if I can get my act together, because they make better sequential sense that way. You’ll understand.

I also am overdue sending an email to a friend, and when I say we write long emails to each other, I mean that my next email will, in all likelihood, be four to five thousand words.

On top of that, and most importantly, I am editing the query letter for HIRAETH as well as the synopsis. The synopsis is not as hard. The query letter, on the other hand, is a nightmare. I mainly want to get an agent just so that I never have to write another query letter again. I feel like that’s a fair reason. *nods sagely*

All that to say, I don’t think there’s any danger of me being bored over the next two weeks.

This might end up being too much writing for such a short amount of time, which is fine. But if I keep myself busy, I won’t be so tempted to pick up HIRAETH prematurely. Also, yesterday, I sat down and calculated how many hours per week I actually spend writing, and it’s around 21. All told, 42 hours feels like it should be sufficient to get everything done.

Having said all that, right now all I want to do is reread HIRAETH, so this might not be so easy after all.

In other news, my birthday is tomorrow, and since I have the day off, my idea of a good time is spending the morning writing before meeting up with my sister and her boyfriend to watch a movie in theaters. Because I’m a New Years baby, everyone else will be celebrating my birthday as well. I’m pretty sure that’s how this works.


Happy New Year, coffee beans!