So it's Monday and I've promised myself I will do things right this week. Today, like it or not, I have to write. Preferably, I'll write something on the WIP that I'm targeting to Blaze, though maybe I'll end up writing something on my paranormal chick-lit instead. I did not get much done last night, even though I thought I would manage to do something. Instead, I got busy surfing the web, working on the Anchor Chain (newsletter of which I am Editor), and tweaking the website. I tell ya, I can't stop playing with it. I like it, but then I go to other writers' websites, the professionally done ones, and I think, whoa. No way does mine look anything like that. How do they do it, I want to know.
See, I'm the kind of person who thinks I can do nearly anything that involves learning. I'm not a computer professional, not even close, but darned if I don't think that with enough study and tinkering, I can pass for one. It's not true, of course, and it's as bad as a computer professional saying, hey, with enough study and tinkering, I can write a novel as good as yours. Not that writers don't come from all walks of life, of course they do, but I'm talking about the guy or gal who isn't the least bit interested in writing to begin with. At least I know my foibles, but it doesn't stop me from studying those sites and wondering how I can improve mine. Maybe when I sell a book or two, I can justify paying someone to design a site for me, but right now I'm on my own. A few short stories, poems, and articles doesn't yet qualify me to spend moolah like that. My husband, dear man, didn't argue about the fact I'm paying for web hosting, or that I spent two entire days last week building a site, but he did ask me when I thought I'd finish the book. He thinks it was time and money well spent, for the future, but he also thinks I need to get my work out there or what's the point.
He's right, of course. I haven't queried an agent or an editor yet with either of these novels. One is still in second draft phase, so I'm not yet satisfied with it, and one is half done. They aren't ready to be out there yet. Unlike my last novel, I intend to be completely ready this time. But you know what, I hate that I have to write the entire novel every single time until I get a contract and can sell on proposal. I know I'm capable of seeing a novel through from beginning to end, but of course an editor or agent can't know that since I am unpublished in book length fiction. They want the complete novel, rightly so, but still. It takes so friggin' long. I wrote my last complete novel in a month and a half, so that's not bad at all, but of course that's first draft. Fleshing it out, turning it into something–that takes a lot longer. I wrote 115 pages of the current novel in a week, but I wrote myself into a corner and I'm busy digging out of that, so it's taken much longer than it should.
Writers are great time wasters, I think. Here I am on a beautiful Hawaiian morning, and I'm blogging and drinking coffee and avoiding opening my book. I will do it, and writing in this blog isn't so unusual for me because I often write in a journal before I begin anyway, but the temptation to surf is strong. I am not a television viewer at all. I'm proud of that, proud of the fact I don't know when Desperate Housewives comes on, or what day I can tune into CSI, etc. I don't have cable, and I never feel the urge to turn on the boob tube. But, I have my own addiction, darn it, and it's attached to my computer via a cable. The WWW is out there, waiting for me to go skipping through it every day. I think the reason I don't like television is because the web is faster, because the sound bites are trimmer, because I can avoid commercials and get the info I want instantly. I don't care about watching American Idol when I can read about what happened instead. And that scares me somewhat because I think, wow, if my attention is this difficult to hold, what do I need to do to be sure I can hold a reader's attention for four hundred pages?
Anyway, guess I need to stop blathering and get busy. I'm aiming for 5 pages today. We'll see how that works out…..