Post-Christmas Update

I hope everyone had a joyous and happy holiday! We did, though the whirlwind of festivities was a bit much for the 9-month-old. Still, I got some good books to help me out as Christmas presents (namely the Intelligent Traveller's Guide to Historic Scotland and Characters & Viewpoint) and some Christmas cash to both pay off my self-debt on the new aquarium and finance future research purchases.

And I've been home all week...not writing. *hangs head* This is actually the first day my computer has even been on. I've been playing with the baby (he's still teething, btw - at the start of December he had no teeth and now he's working on #'s 4 and 5!), doing a little bit of housework, and watching DH play his new Nintendo (yes, the Wii - my mom and I pulled off a nifty little feat snagging him one of those on the release date)

Anyway, thanks to all of you who have offered me encouragement! I do plan to start fresh with the new year. And now that I'm on the computer, I might even go work on something...though as soon as DH gets back from his grocery run, that might get tanked.

Merry Belated Christmas and Happy New Year!

Completely Random

Ganked from the girls at SBTB:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Viscountess Jennifer the Omnipresent of Fishkill St Wednesday Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

And I did them for Elspeth and Alec:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Milady the Most Honourable Elspeth the Recumbent of Eschaton End Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Duke Alasdair the Omnipresent of New Scagglethorpe Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

So he's a Duke...huh. Campbell would be so jealous. (And it was hard to get a good one for Alec...they all sounded too English, and you know that wouldn't work.)

P.S. Check out my new supercool "Library Thing" display below my links!

I am a bad, bad woman...

Yeah, my bright-and-shiny goal of 50K by the end of the year...not gonna happen. I haven't written anything in a couple weeks, and I don't know why I thought the holidays would be a good time to get major wordage down. Add a sick and teething baby, major day job workload, and the setting up/cycling/stocking of the snazzy new aquarium my FIL very generously financed (partially - the rest was an advance of my Christmas bonus, monthly spending money, and other Christmas cash) to the hustle and bustle of traveling, shopping, decorating, wrapping, etc... I say again: yeah, not gonna happen.

I'm okay with it, though. I am taking all next week off, so I'll be home and (presumably) rested and (hopefully) productive. First step of my new plan is to re-work and polish all my current stuff, with an eye to deepening POV and reducing "stage directions" as we were doing on Compuserve recently. Also researching (mainly reading the Jamie bits in Voyager, and other such examples) so I can more effectively write in Alec's POV, per Jo's suggestions. If I can have everything spiffed up and improved by the end of the year, I will consider that major progress. Then that should give me some good momentum for kicking off 2007 with a writing streak. I've been working on nailing down my plot details and figuring out what happens in currently vacant parts of the story. A hoped-for Christmas gift or two should help with that by providing cultural/historical detail.

New overall goal: finish the book by the one-year mark, which is to say next summer. If I stick with 10K a month or so, that should be doable.

Crapometer

So. Miss Snark is doing another crapometer run, starting Friday. This one is for "hooks" (250 words), and she'll request "first pages" (750 words) if she likes it. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to throw my hat in.

The rough mini-synopsis on my excerpts blog is about 400 words. With a little pruning and tweaking, I might could (yeah, I'm from Kentucky) get it down to 250. And I do have 750 words of opener if--on the outside chance--she requests it.

But.

Do I really want to put the summarization of my "original idea" for a novel I'm only 1/4-1/3 of the way done writing up for all and sundry to see? (Sure, it's up on my blog, but how many people read this as opposed to Miss Snark?)

I'm a little protective of it, since I've already been accused of "borrowing from" or "copying" a certain famous author. (Not by the author herself, I should add. Someone else who is familiar with her work but not with mine.) I mean, I know what the whole story is different and unique. And hopefully those of you who read this and have read the books in question have heard enough about my story and characters to know that as well. I feel that when I'm done and my book can be read in its entirety, people will recognize the originality and not think that I just wrote a redux of Famous Author's story. (All right, it's Diana. Just because I have a character time-traveling to Scotland. Even though it's set in a different century, with different characters, different conflict, different plot, etc. And lots of other people have written time-travel romance novels, too. But I've already ranted about that.)

Anyway. I've struggled mightily to flesh out this idea, and I'm making good progress towards completing it, whereupon I can send it out into the world. But I would hate to see it posted online and someone else take it and write something like it before I can finish mine. Then the "original idea" I've struggled so hard to distinguish as being, in fact, original, won't be original anymore.

I'm sure I'm being paranoid. The odds of that happening are probably nil. But still. The accusation stung, for all that it was unfounded, and now I'm gun shy. OTOH, I'd really like to see if my idea can pique people's interest. So I dunno. Should I submit to the crapometer and cross my fingers against my story getting ganked? Should I rewrite certain key elements to keep the same premise, but protect my details? Or should I just call it a wash and hope she does another run later when I have a full MS in hand?

I'll show you mine

Mrs. Mitty suggested a "post-a-snippet" day and quite unashamedly showed us hers, so I'm returning the favor and showing mine. *g* I've posted it over on my excerpt blog.

Here's the link: Elspeth snippet

I've just finished the first revision to work out some of the "stage directions" as per the current discussion on Compuserve. It's still pretty rough, though. Jo is helping me (calling me out on it, really) get better about working dialect and idiosyncratic voice into Alec's POV. So that part especially still needs work.

Last night I didn't actually work on any scenes. But I did spend an hour and a half or so nailing down plotting points and identifying known story events with aspects of the plot structure as outlined in the Crusie/Mayer workshop I attended about a month ago. (Wow, that was a long sentence.) I got some good ideas, came up with a few more questions I need to answer, but in general feel a little more organized WRT the overall structure of the story. So I consider that great progress.

And with that, dear reader, I am going to bed. The baby is simultaneously cutting his first teeth (three at once, the doctor said) and fighting his first ear infection. Needless to say, I was up with him most of the night last night, and may be again tonight. The wonder of antibiotics, though - he should be feeling better by tomorrow.