Seventy Days of Sweat

Starting Sunday I will be participating in the Seventy Days of Sweat.
The goal is to make your word count every day, if you miss a day make those words up on another day, and in the end to finish your book in 70 days (75 if you don't take days off for RWA Nationals).
I'm very excited. I'll be starting off with Sticks and Stones, the contemporary YA I've been working on. After that's finished up I'll be moving on to Walk-In, the urban fantasy YA I'm currently plotting (and very anxious to write. It's been so hard not to drop Sticks and Stones and start on Walk-In, but after my Sticks and Stones revelation yesterday I'm glad I stuck with it).
Come and join us, there will be prizes and you never know when you might meet a new critique partner. I could certainly use a few myself. :D

Eureka!

I got it!!! How can I have been so daft? I realized exactly why I hated my query letter so much. I kept focusing on something big that happens in the story. The story wouldn't be a story at all without it, but it's still not the focus of the book, the two main characters and their relationship is. So freakin' blind.

This entire time I've been focusing on that thing that happened and I'm like, this is what the book is about, but it's not even in there until a third of the way through the book or more, this plot is stupid and doesn't work, good thing this piece of shit is a practice book and I didn't come up with the really great idea for the next one until I was already determined to finish this one before starting anything new. (Sidenote: yeah right, I've been planning the next one like crazy cuz I just can't keep my brain off it.) But now, I see, with the focus on the characters, this book might be salvageable with a little reworking. I was beginning to question whether or not I would ever really query this book or just dismiss it completely as practice and practice queries on the next book, but now I think it might be worth query practice before retiring it to the box under my bed.

I fell asleep working on a chapter where there's some banter between the two main characters and I woke up from my little nap and the query was in my head screaming. The cat was terrified as I shoved him off my stomach and began rummaging around the bed for the notebook and pen I had before falling asleep, squealing like a madwoman. He ran to the other side of the room, watching me write and when I was done wouldn't let me get near him for a good 5-10 minutes. Poor Baal. (Heh, for those that don't know we named our cat after the Lord of Destruction from a video game, we are, in fact, that geeky)

Off to go sit in a park and write like mad because I'm so freakin' excited. Maybe stop by the bookstore for tea and a blueberry scone first. Yum, scone.