Five Links Friday 11/22/13

Back to share another five links that caught my attention over the last seven days.

1. From The Masquerade Crew, here is some Marketing Advice for Beginning Authors.

2. Your Writing Coach has some good advice for Instilling Intimacy into your Writing.

3. Music is definitely important to me (as my inclusion in Dark Side of the Moon: A Song Stories Anthology might tell you) and what I listen to when I write greatly affects the result.  Diana Maria talks about how music helps here with writer's block over at BackwoodsAuthor.com

4. Toby Neal takes a look at something all writers have been through in her latest post, Rejection, Straight Up, No Ice

5. And finally, here are the Top Ten Tips on “Leadership & Role Models” by Lakiba Pittman just because I'm into that type of thing.

See you soon, an as always have a great weekend.

A fresh look at writing goals and NaNoWriMo

November is nearly two-thirds of the way through and I’m sure most writers at my level are currently pushing through their daily word counts trying to keep up with NaNoWriMo right now. Not me, though. For the second time in a row, I skipped it.

I started out the year expecting to hit NaNoWriMo hard this year and finish a 50,000 word first draft of another novel, but I just decided it can wait a year. I could go on and on about how busy life is right now (and it really is with a new baby and a two-year-old at home) but that’s not why I opted out. This year I just decided it wasn’t something I needed to do in order to reach my writing goals.

NaNoWriMo is an awesome way to finish a novel (or at least a good 50,000 word chunk of one.) It just isn’t necessary to do it every year. Just like with anything else, when you’re trying to make progress in writing, you’ve got to prioritize. My top writing priorities right now are to get a few more short stories published and then find a literary agent.

After getting around twenty-five agent rejections, I decided to put querying on hold momentarily and work on another revision of the first novel and then revamp my query letter and synopsis, incorporating some of the helpful feedback from the rejection letters. I also decided that since ten is a nice round number, I want to wait until I’ve published ten short stories. (I’m pretty close; with ten acceptances, but they don’t count until they actually hit the printing press.)

So to reiterate my goals for the remainder of this year and most of next year, I’ll keep working on short stories until ten have been published. After that, I’ll work on the revision of my first novel, as well as the synopsis and query letter. When I’m happy with that, I’ll start cleaning up the second novel as I wait for agent responses.

After both novels are in the process of finding an agent, it will be time to start working on the third.

And that should be right around November 2014.

Five Links Friday 11/15/13

Okay, I'm back with five links I read during the week that are worth sharing.  Give 'em a look.

1. From Brian Tracy's blog (a place you should visit at least once a week) here are 3 Key Leadership Styles That Create Personal Success.  Remember, you don't need to be in management to lead.

2. On a similar topic, here are 7 Costs of Blame from John G. Miller's excellent blog.

3. Moving on to writing, here are some Inside Stories About Memorable Books from twenty prominent editors via Publisher's Weekly.

4. Here is a short, but informative post from Brian Klems at Writer's Digest answering the question: How Long Should Novel Chapters Be?

5. And here are 6 Self-Publishing Missteps You Should Avoid if you're looking into self-publishing, care of Terry Tyler guest posting at Molly Greene's site.

And that is all.  See ya soon.

Dark Side of the Moon: A Song Stories Anthology

My short story "Apollo 20" is available today in Dark Side of the Moon": A Song Stories Anthology, published by Song Story Press.

 
Take a walk on the Dark Side and leave your sanity behind. Tales of madness and twisted brilliance abound in this collection of stories inspired songs both classic and new.

Five Links Friday 11/8/13

Taking a break from a busy November to bring back Five Links Friday...

1. From NaNoWriMo's Pep Talks, Malinda Lo takes a good look at the myths surrounding inspiration in writing.

2. Here's an article from Writer's Digest outlining 4 Reasons You Need A Business Plan For Your Book

3. And with that in mind, here's a great and detailed post (with numbers!) from Rachel Thompson telling you How Much Indie Authors Can Realistically Make

4. Here's a post from John G. Miller looking at personal accountability, which is something we all could improve on in one way or another: Personal Accountability: Fixing Me

5. And finally, here's an article from the New York Times that will make you think about what you really want to do with your life: I Want to Be a Millennial When I Retire

So there's your weekend reading.  Enjoy.