Doing What Must be Done

     Where has May gone? Five days of it went on a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, to see my son get his doctorate in physics.Yes, I'm bragging a little. Having no math skills at all, having taken advanced biology and dissected a cat to avoid taking physics in high school, I am immensely happy he got my husband's brains for this subject. The weather was terrible--windy, cold, and rainy, but we rejoiced anyhow and mostly celebrated indoors. Spent one extra day of this trip stranded in Houston when our last flight was cancelled--and then there was the week long catch up on mail, e-mail, laundry, and groceries. You would have thought we were gone a month instead of less than a week.
     Regardless, I didn't work on my new book, Sister of a Sinner, for over a week.  It is hard to get back in the groove of a writing schedule even after such a short time.  A Will of her Own came out in April, and The Courville Rose is due out first week in June, both needing some publicity efforts. An Ashy Affair went through two edits and is now off to line editors and the galley stage. I guess it will be my autumn book, appropriate since it takes place in October. While all this was going on, I worked in spurts on Sister, five-hundred words here, a thousand there, and some days nothing.  It has picked up speed now since my only other resolution is to find an agent for my Regency series. I'd rather write than face all those rejections again.
     Yes, seventeen books in print, soon to be eighteen, and I still fear rejection.  A good friend has given me the name of his agent. As soon as he wrote the name, I realized this is a revered old agency, one that rejected me many years ago more than once.  I have grown a lot in my writing skills since then, have a modest fan base (and ten followers of this blog!), yet I am still scared to approach them.
     Being fairly good at forcing myself to do what must be done which includes painful cuts and rewrites of my work, I will take this plunge, but probably not before I finish Sister. I'm over twenty-thousand words in on what will probably be a seventy-thousand word book, so I should have it done in around sixty days or two months, say by the first of August. In the more laid back field of e-publishing, I've learned to set my own goals and deadlines.  Discipline is the key to getting 'er done, whatever it is that is holding you back.  Write every day. I strive for 1,000 words each time I sit down at the computer. Some writers won't have the time to do that much, so do whatever you can. Promise yourself  you will complete that book by a self-imposed deadline, good practice should your publisher ever impose one. When edits and galleys come through, do them at once, and then get back to writing your book. No dallying!
      I revise yesterday's work before beginning today's writing. This makes for a very clean first draft needing only light revision.  Once I polish the second draft, I move on to writing the synopsis and a blurb that can be used in a query or on a back cover. With this is complete, boom, off it goes to my editor to accept or reject, and oh, yes, I still get rejections.  I've had three I thought were sure things turned down. Two were accepted that I felt were long shots as they aren't my usual type of book.  However, those long shots went through grueling, unpleasant edits that often made me wish they had been turned down.  Both became very good stories, I think, and the reader will never know what blood, sweat, and tears went into them--as it should be.
     So, discipline, self-imposed deadlines and word counts, editing as you go along, then taking the big leap to submit will get you where you want to go--eventually.  Good luck to all of us.