Progress report

My commitments for the year continue apace...

A to Z Challenge

I'm already feeling the brain drain from this. I have a handful of posts written already -- F, O, Q (yup!) L, H and A -- but a long way to go, obviously. You're going to be seeing an awful lot of me in April, so I hope you don't mind if there's a little less in March and May.

Submissions

I said I would  begin querying agents with Course Corrections in the spring. In my head, spring = March. Revisions had been done, query and synopsis written, and I worked up a list of about a dozen agents to target. In February I found out that four of those agents were participating in an online query contest at Cupid's Literary Connection, so I submitted, got through the first eliminations, and bit my nails for a week while the agents looked at the queries.

I won two partial requests... neither from any of the four agents I'd meant to target. (LOL!) But, hey, no complaints. The partials are in their hands now. We'll see what happens. I've still got eight names on my list to hit up, if nothing else.

Writing: Disciple

Part III has been written, and needs some work to finish out its first draft. This requires addressing the issues in Part II that my (wonderful, perceptive, owe-you-chocolate) betas brought up, because the emotional situation in III leads directly off the end of II...  even if this means bulking up Part II even more. I'm not going to worry about the size of these (obsessing is not worry, after all) and I'm just going to treat each Part as if it should stand alone. Each should be a complete story unto itself.

So what if I'm 153,000 words into it with at least two more Parts to go. (But not six more. NOT.) The first incarnation of this story -- which was far too bloated, bogged-down and meandering -- was half a million words. I'm still slimming it down considerably.

Half a million words, I kid you not. Has everyone heard of the 10,000 hours theory of mastering a skill? The writer's equivalent, it's said, is your first million words. I've put in my first million words -- and I'm not going to say I've mastered writing, because I don't think you ever do -- and yeah, they were shitty. But there was good stuff in there. Gems in the shit. I'm just trying to mount them in something more worthy.

How are your commitments for the year going?