Welcome to 2012! I’ll be honest, despite some wonderful things happening last year* I am SO HAPPY to see 2011 go. It was a very hard year. But 2012 is going to be GREAT! I am determined to make it great. To that end, I am making a set of New Year’s Resolutions to help keep me on track and make this the best year ever.** Without further ado, here are my resolutions:

1. Finish revisions on BEFORE, send out to beta readers and eventually query.

This is totally doable, since I have just a few more scenes to add in and then it will be off to betas. But the querying part…gulp.

2. Write (a first draft of) 1 new book.

I pray this is doable. I now have a writing schedule, forced on me mainly by the Wee Ninja and a full time job. Basically, I am going to have to do 5 − 1k 1 hours a week, most of them before anyone in the house wakes up. Yeah, you read that right. My alarm will go off by 5:30 am every day. And to all you scoffing at that and saying, “I wake up at 4 am every day!” I ask…do you have a small being who has decided s/he needs to eat EVERY THREE HOURS? Because I do. Luckily she’s cute so I’m going to keep her.***

3. Read 50 books.

This is a total wild card. I didn’t track the number of books I read in 2011, particularly after Wee entered our lives, so I have no idea what my reading rate is at the moment. But this isn’t even a book a week, so it sounds plausible.

4. Blog more frequently. Heck, do all social media more frequently.

This should be totally doable, but I am lazy. Also my brain is still a sieve and half the time I have no idea what day of the week it is. But I do miss blogging, especially my old Friday posts where I wrote on things that mattered to me. So this is going on the list!

Also! I do realize last year I failed to write a wrap-up post on my write-two-books-in-a-year goal for 2010, so better late than never. I think I made that goal. I definitely finished a first draft of BEFORE, and in doing so I realized something: I write short first drafts. So the WIP I worked on in March & April of 2010 probably was a complete first draft. It was a sucky, short first draft, but it was complete. Because the work I was doing at the end of April was actually editing — adding new chapters to delve deeper into characters, cutting part of the beginning, etc. All of my previous works were not written chronologically, so it was easy for me to miss that I had finished a first draft and was moving on to editing. BEFORE is the first time I’ve ever written start-to-finish, so it was the first time I knew exactly when I was done with the first draft. 

I would write a wrap-up for 2011, but basically it was this: be pregnant, work on house, unpack boxes, have child, re-write entire WIP in one month, drink whiskey****.

*Mainly the Wee Ninja (a.k.a. The Bean) joining us.

**This is a big deal because I DO NOT make NY resolutions. Ever. Never ever. But I think this year requires them.

***But please God, let her start sleeping through the nights again!!!

****And beer. And scotch. Oh, and coffee. Plenty of coffee.

Hi! I am back! And in possession of a shiny new baby, a shiny new kitchen, and a shiny new sleep deprivation!* Also apparently in possession of only an exclamation point…sorry about that. Rather than make a bunch of excuses I’m just going to jump into a post about writing because that’s what you’re all here for, right? Not cute pictures of my baby and ramblings from a new mom. Here goes!

So we all know I finally finished my WIP last fall. But I knew as soon as I finished it there were MAJOR REVISIONS needed. Like, whip out a scalpel and carve the whole thing apart types of revisions. And being a good writer, I plotted my revisions and made fancy charts** to make sure things would work. But when I started on my revisions, it was hard to gain momentum. I know part of it was due to pregnancy - there was no creativity here, couldn’t even read books for a while (I know!) - and being busy.*** Then I had a baby and had all sorts of free time. (What, did you hear that laughter where you are? I tried to stifle it.) Each and every day during that time I felt guilty for not writing. All consuming guilt some days. But I. Just. Couldn’t. Write. Something was wrong.

What was wrong? I was too deep in the story and couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I had some great notes from people but couldn’t process them. The story was, indeed, seriously broken. But not in the way I thought, and it wasn’t until I took a step back and talked to my fabulous, genius crit partner Alison over a nice cup of steaming tea in a quiet little tea house that I saw the problem (after Alison called it out…did I mention she is a genius?): I was trying to do revisions on the book as it existed, but it was missing something. One little thing was wrong with the premise of the story and it had HUGE RAMIFICATIONS to the entire book. And once I saw the problem, lightbulbs went off. I knew what was wrong and how to fix it, or at least how to start fixing it. Now I have a timeline for my revisions (sticking it so far!) and am remembering just why I loved this story in the first place. And now that I’m making progress on my revisions, I can start working on a new WIP too. One that requires me to research Arthurian legend and watch the UK show Merlin. 

Have I mentioned lately how much I love writing? 

*That last one is totally the best. I highly recommend sleep deprivation, best thing I ever diddfkkkjn. Oops, fell asleep on the key board.

**I am VERY GOOD at making charts. 

***This time was filled with work and moving our second floor to our first floor, the living room and office**** into the dining room and then into the attic so the kitchen could go into the dining room. 

****Here’s an important note: if you REMOVE a structural support post from a house PUT IT BACK. There was apparently one missing in our house, which we found out when our (my) books started to collapse our floor. *Headdesk*