Meredith Mansfield, Author

I’m blogging a day early this week.

I decline to make resolutions this year because, let’s face it, we all forget about our resolutions by Valentine’s Day at the latest. Goals, though. Goals are measurable and goals can be self-motivating. As you make progress toward a goal, and see that you’re making progress, it becomes self-rewarding. Goals also tweak that competitive streak. So, I’ll make goals for the coming year.

Writing Goals:

1. Dispose of BLOOD WILL TELL one way or another. It’s time to cut ties on this one and move on. BLOOD WILL TELL was originally written in 2009. It’s been queried fairly widely, had a few requests for partials or the full manuscript. A full is out now. If that agent declines, I’m going to e-pub it. I think it’s good enough. Besides, BLOOD WILL TELL is a paranormal romance. Everything I’m writing now is YA or MG. Finding the right agent for BLOOD WILL TELL and its sequels isn’t necessarily going to yield the right agent for my current and future works.
2. Keep querying MAGE STORM. I really think this one is good enough, too.
3. Get SEVEN STARS (hopefully with a better title) out there. This is my best yet. This means a polishing edit, getting a decent query together, writing the synopsis, and researching agents (although I can build on the list I already have for MAGE STORM).
4. Get MAGIC’S FOOL polished up. It’s only a first draft right now. It’s going to need two or three more drafts. And readers. I have that slated for March. Like SEVEN STARS, I’ll want to give it a good long rest before the final edit. I probably won’t start querying this one until 2013 (assuming the Mayans were wrong, of course).
5. Keep writing. Well, here I have an embarrassment of riches, even leaving aside the sequels to MAGE STORM and MAGIC’S FOOL. There are the two sequels to BLOOD WILL TELL. If I e-pub this, I’ll want the sequels as follow-ups. My YA alternate history, THE BARD’SGIFT. A new idea for a retelling of “Little Furball”. DREAMER’S ROSE, if I can ever figure out what that story needs to make it really shine. And a couple of short story ideas. I have to follow up on that Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future. I’ve got a couple of ideas. I’ve just been too swamped with the novels to write them.

Personal Goals:

1. Get a regular exercise program established. It has to be something I can do at home. Possibly something to make walking the dogs a little more fitness-related as well. Something I won’t mind keeping up when the weather turns warm, too. My measurable goal for this is modest. Two pounds a month. If I can lose two pounds a month it would make a real difference in so many ways.
2. Repair my seriously broken sleep habits. I sleep for four or five hours, get up and putter around for two and then go back to bed. Ridiculous. I need to work towards one lump of continuous sleep. (Unless, of course, a great idea hits me in the middle of the night. That has happened once or twice.) 
3. Get the vegetable garden cleaned up and back in full production. Keep it that way.

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Rebekah Loper passed these awards on to me, so now I have to fulfill the requirements and pass them on. Kind of like a chain letter.

The Blog on Fire Award requires me to tell you 7 new things about myself.

1. I live in an old house. The original house was built as a sort of Mother-In-Law unit in the 1930’s. It’s been added on to at least three times and it’s still only about 1500 square feet, so you can imagine the original house must have been tiny. Old houses have quirks. For example: both the front and back doors open onto the front patio. There is no door directly to the back yard. You have to walk around. Old houses also require maintenance. Living in an old house without either the skills or the money to take care of it is no walk in the park.
2. For a small house, it has a huge yard. In fact, the yard is too big. I love to garden, but I’ve had to reconcile myself to the idea that I will never have all of the yard looking nice at the same time. It’s like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Concentrate on cleaning up one area and three others get weedy and overgrown. A yard this size is very close to a full time job in itself. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting the vegetable garden cleaned up and planted for the winter.
3. The garage is huge and I need to put that space to better use. The detached garage is probably larger than the original house. It has three rooms! The first is an oversized one car garage. The other two rooms are a workshop and a storage room. The workshop is currently full of Dad’s old wood-working tools. Dad’s been dead for twelve years last week and I’m definitely not going to use the table saw or the jig saw or that monster drill press that’ll take two men and a boy to move. I think it’s time I got rid of some of that and put the space to better use. Maybe this winter.
4. I come from a long line of pack rats. I’m the fourth generation of my family to live on this property, so we’ve had plenty of time (and space) to accumulate stuff. Example: Among the things I know are in the storage room, there is a set of cast iron cobblers lasts. Heaven only knows where those came from. I’m gradually trying to weed some of that out and not just in the garage. Not nearly fast enough. Alas, I also come from a long line of procrastinators.
5. Although I live very much in the suburbs–in many ways more urban than sub–there’s plenty of wildlife around here. Sometimes too much. I’m not talking just about the birds and the bees and the butterflies. Not sure about now, but I have found salamanders in a couple of places. You wouldn’t expect that in a fairly dry climate, but there they were. There are a few ground squirrels who do a high-wire act on the telephone lines and drive the dogs and cats nuts. In addition to those, we have semi-resident opossums. Raccoons, too. Usually, they’re just passing through, but before I had dogs, we had at least two litters of raccoon kits born on the property. One was under the house. I know because we opened up one wall to find out what was making the scratching noise. Imagine our surprise when a raccoon kit climbed up to check us out. Lately, we’ve also had a couple of skunks move into the neighborhood. Those aren’t so welcome. For a couple of days, the skunks tried to move in under the house, which forced me to take steps.
6. I’m a lousy housekeeper, but a good cook. I hate to vacuum. I’d rather go to the dentist. I can always find something better to do, like writing. Which means that my dust bunnies have time to grow into dust dinos. My fondest wish is to rip up the carpets and do something with the pine floors underneath. I don’t mind sweeping. I like cooking, though–most of the time. I make a vegetable beef soup that’ll stick to your ribs. It’s almost cold enough to make that. And I can bake. My traditional contribution to the family Thanksgiving dinner is the pies.
7. Writing is my third “career”, if you can call something a career when you haven’t made any money at it, yet. I was trained as a financial analyst and currently live on a small pension from that job. Then I became a Visual Basic programmer. Now I write stories instead of code. Writing was almost my fourth career, because I’m also trained as a paralegal. But I’ve never worked in that field–yet. 

The 7 x 7 Link Award requires me to choose some of my posts in certain categories. This was hard.

Posts:

1.  Most Beautiful: I don’t generally use a lot of graphics. I’m going to go with the story for this one.  Check it out.
2. Most Helpful: Two related posts Harsh Critiques and The Sandwich Method
3. Most Popular: According to WordPress, this is Powering Through with 79 views. No idea why.
4. Most Controversial: E-Publishing How much has changed in less than a year. Probably wouldn’t be even remotely controversial now.
5. Most Sccessful: Since I have no way of gauging this, I’m going to go with Agents Day
6. Most Underrated:  This one is a pure stab in the dark. Procrastination
7. Most Prideworthy: A sentimental favorite, here. Something Exciting 

Pass it on:

1. Robin Weeks
2. Michael McDuffee
3. Karen T. Smith She hasn’t posted recently, but there’s some interesting stuff about her e-publishing experience.

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Whew! It looks like we’re going to make it through August without any major problems. If you’ve read last year’s post about Awful August, you’ll know what a relief that is. Of course, other parts of the country are having a truly awful August after Hurricane Irene.

Now, enough about me and what I’m doing. (If you’re interested, I’ve finished up revisions to SEVEN STARS and MAGE STORM. I’m about to make some final revisions to my Writers of the Future entry and send it off. Then I’m going to plunge back into MAGIC’S FOOL.)

But, I’m going to start doing something a little different on this blog. Occasionally, instead of talking about what I’m working on, I’m going to write about what I’ve been reading. Writers read. Maybe once a month, maybe more often, I’ll do a post about what I’ve been reading.

I just finished PARANORMALCY by Kiersten White and loved it. I’m going to have to get my hands on the sequel. I knew it was going to be a fun read as soon as the main character took out her hot pink, rhinestone-encrusted taser to deal with the menacing vampire. It didn’t let me down for a moment.

It has a very sweet romance, too, because you know every young adult novel has got to have some romance and I’m a sucker for the sweet ones. For some reason, almost every steamy (adult) romance I’ve ever cracked open has left me at some point with my head cocked to the side and my nose scrunched up thinking “Really?” That usually happens in the payoff scene, too. Sweet works just about every time, though.

Now I’m reading THE FLOATING ISLANDS by Rachel Neumeier. I’m only into Chapter 4, so it’s a little too early to say on this one. It’s definitely got a great premise. A young boy arriving at the islands that float above the ocean by dragon magic and instantly becoming obsessed with joining the elite corps of men who fly by dragon magic. And his cousin, who wants very badly to do things that girls simply aren’t allowed to do.

When you write mostly young adult and middle grade, you read a lot of it, too. Although I do take a break now and then for something aimed at a slightly older audience.

In that vein, I’ve also just finished BROTHERS IN ARMS by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s Lieutenant Lord Miles Vorkosigan at his usual insubordinate, extemporizing best. Miles is the master of chaos, even when he discovers he has a clone he never knew he had–and the clone wants to take over his life. I came to the Vorkosigan Saga late, because it’s science fiction and I mostly read fantasy. But really, whatever your tastes, read something by Bujold. If I’ve ever been disappointed by one of her stories, it’s only because the others have set such a high standard.

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I finished revising the first chapter of SEVEN STARS last night. I dare to hope that things will start moving a little more swiftly, now.

That first chapter hopefully got me back into the characters and voice of this story. It was also in need of some fairly heavy revision. The first couple of versions had not gotten deeply enough into the character’s head and heart. Hopefully, I’ve fixed that, now.

So, I will be moving on to Chapter 2 today. Also in need of some revision, but not quite as much. This is where I’ll start incorporating some of the new ideas that have been generated by discussion with the early readers. That’s the part I’m really excited about, so that should help get me moving, too.

There are changes to certain objects that didn’t have as much purpose in the completed story as originally envisioned. They’re going to get some new functionality which should up the early conflict considerably.

There are changes to tie the magic system into a more integrated whole.

Trickier will be the changes to some side characters. Well, not so much changes to the way I’ve always envisioned them. More improved showing of why they behave as they do. It’s not always straight forward to show the motivations of side characters when they never have the point of view. Still , I think there are things I can do to make one of the two POV characters understand what’s really going on much earlier. That, too, will hopefully increase the conflict.

There is at least one side character who got pretty much dropped out of the loop completely. I think I’ve got a plan on how to bring him back in, too.

Lots to do. Now, if I can just keep my nose out of certain computer puzzles that have helped me waste a good deal of time over the last few days, I may actually make some progress.

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I was going to blog about something else today, but then I read this on Writer Beware. By the way, if you’re a writer and you’re not following this blog, you should be. 

I can barely imagine how hurtful this kind of prank would be.

Writers beware of pranks like this.

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