I’ve been meaning to update for a while, since I’ve got some fun stuff starting to take shape as I switch gears once again. I finally just made some time to do it.

I crashed and burned on the MayNoWriMo challenge, and in the process I realized I wasn’t ready to dive into my baseball novel. I have some more thinking I need to do on it, and I really feel like I need to start over from scratch on that book.

And I think I’ll have more tools to do that after the October Master Class that I’m attending in Lincoln City, Oregon. It’s a two-week “boot camp” for professional writers (um, like me!) who want to push their writing to the next level and also learn the ins-and-outs of the publishing business (the biz stuff should be especially fascinating this year, as so much of publishing has imploded in the past twelve months or so).

But what I really want to get out of this workshop is the boost I need to get off this plateau I feel I’ve been on for a couple years now. Now that the boys are older and a bit more independent, I’m ready to push myself again. I can afford to lose a little sleep to get up and write now that Mitch and Drew are getting to sleep at a good time and sleeping all night. And not waking up until “seven oh oh,” as Drew would put it — he has a digital clock in his room, and he knows the rules. 🙂

I’m also going to push myself to exercise again — another missing piece of the puzzle for me. I went for a lovely jog this morning in the dark, and I realized that if I go before I sit down to write, I don’t have to drag my butt out of the chair and go after I get on a roll with the current novel or story. And I’ll feel better and have more energy. I’ll be tracking my miles jogged on this nifty counter: Run Log.

My goal is to jog at least 100 miles before my trip to Oregon in October (right now I’m just jogging one mile at an outing — don’t laugh!).

So now that the baseball novel is on the backburner, I’ve been trying to revise and write a couple new stories, but even more importantly, I’ve been thinking about my young-adult fantasy novel again.

I got some good feedback from Colleen, my agent, on the point-of-view characters, and how I need to just have one of them. Yep, yet another rewrite. I finally got around to reworking my outline, moving my protagonist Kelley into existing scenes where she wasn’t before, and adding some new stuff I can’t wait to draft, and man — it’s coming together! I hope to have all the heavy lifting and rearranging done by the end of May, so I can just dive into the revising and maybe even be done by the end o’ June.

I’ve also got a pile of reading to do for my workshop (12 books, including a mystery antho that’s bigger than our 1.5-year-old Mitch, and that’s saying something!), and that’s been inspiring me to write, too. I always get fired up to write when I read more. I think I’ve read more in the past 2 weeks than I have in the previous 5 months of this year! With more reading to come, too.

Whew. I really should update more, so it doesn’t all come pouring out like rainwater sitting in gutter. Have a great weekend!