Another Quick Post

I really need to not only update the sidebar on this blog but to post more often.

One of my resolutions for the New Year.

It's just so hard finding the time between writing my stories, trying to get in a good bout of reading every day, working full-time and all the other sundry things one must do to get through the day. *sigh*

I truly hope to do better in 2007. I'd really like to post more on my blog and visit other bloggers too.

I finished my goals, writing-wise, for the last quarter of this year. I have five short stories out in the wilderness awaiting a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I'm currently rewriting a story that was accepted some time back but the anthology went belly-up. I'm also making notes for a novel I will start in January.

One of the things that helped me, I think, accomplish my goals these past couple of months was being very specific about what I wanted to do on a particular day. Instead of just writing, "work on short story" on my t0-do chart, I wrote something like "revise scene where hero and heroine first meet" or "deepen description in last scene drafted."

It seemed to help. When I get home from work, most of the time my mind is totally fog-bound with the stuff I've had to deal with all day and if I didn't have a specific task to accomplish writing-wise, I just stared numbly at the computer screen.

I've been reading Syd Field's updated and revised books on screenwriting. I have no desire to write a movie but I've found that screenwriting books can be very helpful for writing fiction. Anyway, Field said that the hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write. Amen to that.

So, by being more specific when I write my to-do list, I have a specific goal in mind when I sit down at my desk. As I said, it helped me get four short stories written in two months. That might not sound like a lot, but for me it was a lot.