Tie Me to the Keyboard

or How to Spend the Snow Day NOT Finishing a Novel

Today I had a whole free day to write. 24 hours to spin new plots, characters, ideas, to flesh them out, to make it all real.

I may have written two hundred words. Maybe.

I blame it all on Paul Delaney. I'm having major problems with him. I spent the majority of the day trying to ignore him, which was much more difficult than it should have been, considering he's a fictional character.

So what did I do today instead of put out a couple thousands words of Mr. Delaney's novel?

- checked facebook approx. 80 times
- ditto for my google account
- completed various home decorating projects
- ran errands...in the snow (anything to get out of the house and away from the blinking cursor)
- watched two episodes of 'How I Met Your Mother' and one of 'Brothers and Sisters'
- smoked an entire hookah alone
- played with the cat
- talked to my mother on the phone...three times
- discussed the merits of dark children's movies (such as "The Secret of Nimh" and "The Last Unicorn") with my roommate
- read about John Cleese's allegedly 27 year old girlfriend
- watched the beginning of "The Last Unicorn" with roommate

So, yeah...productive day. Also, facebook is the devil. I'm considering deleting my account.

Goals for a new year...

My brain was not too fuzzy at midnight this year (though it became increasinly more so throughout the night, until we stumbled through my front door at 8AM), but the resolution I decided on was wondrously vague. I wanted (want to) "be a better person." This is fine. This is good. But it's not exactly a life plan.

I've since broken it down in my head, a bit: all the different things that "better" entails. It's still not much of a NY resolution-- the best ones are specific and attainable-- but it's an excellent direction.

Last night I came up with a more specific goal. I want to have a book published by the time I'm thirty. Three and a half years. Not a lot of time, really. And since I haven't been using this blog much lately, I think I might chronicle my efforts here. We'll see. But, as demonstrated by the Summer Reading List (which was great, til I was reading too fast to provide summaries), I do better work when I'm holding myself accountable, somewhere. Might as well be here.

So, first mini-goals. I will read the "advice for writers" in "Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents 2009" and will begin to write query letters to agents in February. I will totally revise "Liar" and finish my chapters in "Nice the Novel" by the end of April. I will start a box of all my big, fat rejection letters.

I like having a plan.