Nose Meet Grindstone

It's hard to believe that it has been almost 3 months since the last time I wrote a blog entry. It has been one of the busiest, most frustrating starts to the school year in my career and anything beyond that realm has been pushed to a back burner. There are plenty of days where I feel like I am holding on by the tips of my fingers. And when you consider that my son's sleeping habits have changed and we're not exactly getting great sleep at the Zeleznik Compound, it's a miracle I've gotten anything done that doesn't involve planning, grading, the Common Core or APPR! But I have, somehow, managed to get some things done. A major rewrite, some new words that have been impeded by the loss of Verdell (my home computer) for a little while and some advance thinking about what I'm going to work on down the line. Unfortunately, with that comes sacrifice, meaning I haven't been blogging as frequently as I would have liked. There's something about today that makes me feel like I needed to get something on to the blog. Could have something to do with tomorrow being the anniversary of my hip surgery, it could be the holidays or it could just be I want to occupy myself in a moment of thought where I'm going to act like a little baby.

I'm entrenched in this contemporary YA that I'm writing, but it's proving to be harder than I thought, especially considering I did a major rewrite of one of my fantasy books then tried to dive back into the contemp. It's not that easy and I sort of struggled getting back into the "head" of the narrator of the contemp. It's 1st person, so it's very, very different from what I'm used to writing and I have to sort of get into the mindset. Not having a computer over Thanksgiving break killed all and nay productivity...it's very difficult to write in a notebook while keeping an eye on a mobile 9 month old. Now that Verdell is up and running, I'm going to give a real run at hammering out the contemp as quickly as possible. I think it's a good story, I just need some good old fashioned butt-in-seat time. Hopefully, two weeks of Christmas break will help!

I need new words right now. I need them because I've been sort of in rewrite purgatory for the entire year...I took a break for the novella but still, I'm stuck in my own old words and I need some fresh blood in my writing because I'm looking down the barrel of some more rewriting, though it won't be as much as a rewrite as a straight up murder.

Between the rewrite and novella, I'm realizing that I need to pretty much write the second book of my SEASONS series from scratch, so I've got some planning to do. I realized that the pacing of SPRING is all wrong and I need to pretty much blow it up and rebuild. Sigh. Hashtag writer problems.

The plan, as I see it, is to spend a few days catching up on the school work I'm behind on (and there's always a truckload of that) and then sit down and do a real writing plan then get to writing.