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Current Projects -- July, 2009

Writing priorities

My next big assignment for my class is due July 28. The conference begins July 30. So my writing priorities, in order:

  • Finish chapter 2
  • Write pitches for conference
  • Finish planning/outlining

The goal in an agent pitch at a conference is to get the agent to request the manuscript. It's not a make-or-break thing though. Great writers can be lousy pitchers and vice versa. If you don't get a request at the conference, then you just query -- and 99%+ of agents are gotten through querying. The only benefit to meeting an agent at a conference is that you have a chance to make a face-to-face, personal connection. That's awesome if you ultimately end up working together. If you don't, it's just networking. That face-to-face meeting, though, is not, in and of itself, going to get you an agent. It's all about the writing!!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Making progress!

I've been planning and planning, but when I finally tried to put words on paper, I was stuck. I wrote the same page over and over. Was it good? Was it crapped? Was it overwritten? I had no clue, and it was driving me crazy. I hadn't written "real" fiction in years -- I was out of practice and frustrated.

So finally I decided to sign up for an online fiction writing course. I figured it would give me some accountability, force me to produce on a regular basis, and hopefully provide some decent critiques. It worked! I've actually maintained interest in the class, and I've been writing regularly. I'm still painfully slow, but it's all coming back to me and getting easier with practice. I've gotten some good feedback too, which is increasing my confidence.

I signed up to attend the Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference at the end of this month. It's local, so I won't have to pay for travel or hotel. It'll be a good networking experience, and agent and editor pitching sessions are included in the base price. My goal is to have some sample pages ready to take with me.

Oh, I made two key decisions, FINALLY. FIrst, I'm writing the story I want to write, which means I'm writing a mainstream novel from Charm's POV. Second, the dog's name is River. Now I need to come up with a good title! The one I have has been universally criticized as boring.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

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