Wake Me Up When September Starts

A new month is quickly approaching and is the end of the year and the end of my coincidental age/year correlation. I have been 26 for the vast majority of 2012. If you didn't gather 2 x 6 = 12. Anyway... I have this weird superstition with numbers. I tend to play these little games where I see if I can divide or mulitply something to equal 12. Most of the time it works, oddly enough. But I always see 12 as a sign of good fortune. For example when I was 13 I thought I had appendicitus. I went to the hospital and even spent a night there. But... the number I was handed in the ER was 12. I told my mom then and there that I was fine. Yet that didn't stop her worrying and spending a fortune for me to stay overnight and have nothing happen except the fact that I was poked and prodded for hours by amateurs that were insistent that I have an IV. Ugh... but I digress. My Birthday is november 4th. On that day I promised myself that i would have an agent. I intend to keep that or else I shall parish. This is the year that I make my career and life happen. I must. So with the approach of a new month, and my birthday drawing closer, I have decided to spend every day in the month of September working on one chapter of my book. I will devote the evening, after I get off work, to pouring over it and make certain that it is up to par. I know I can do it. I have found in the past, since the book I intend to finish-finish was done as such, that I work better under 30 day deadlines. I finished this novel during NaNoWrimo. I suppose it only seems fitting that I would finish it in a similar fashion. Instead of meeting a certain number of words per day I will instead work on chapters. Luckily my novel is only 33 chapters and tend to be rather short. So it isn't going to be overwhelming. I think that has been the crux of my problem. I just find the overall task of editing a novel length work of fiction daunting. I become frightened and scurry into the shadows avoiding it at all cost. I think it also doesn't help that I am turning a critical eye on to my art. But if I intend to make a career out of what i love to do (which is making up stories) then I must forge on.I have faith in myself. I know I can do this. I must do this. I will do this.

It's been awhile...

... how have you been, you blog of mine? Yeah, we had a moment awhile ago. It was brief but exciting. I had such high hopes but... they were childrens fantasies. But I am back. I have had a xanga site for going on eleven years. That's pretty fricken amazing. Most people get bored with that site after maybe a year but I have been putting away on it for some time. So it basically gets all of my attention. This blog here... well it was a fling. But I feel my xanga and I have gotten... distant. We don't seem to mesh as well as we once had. I'm beginning to search outside of the relationship. So thus I return to you. I made a promise to myself that once I finished with the third Sookie Stackhouse book I would return to working on my novel The Love Immortal. It has been some time since I have worked on it. I had, again, such high hopes and even marked a day on my calendar of when I would get an agent. Sadly that day has drawn dangerously close and I have refused to even look at my manuscript for fear of returning to the wicked headspace of my inner critic. My self esteem is shot to hell. There isn't anything I really like about myself to begin with so anything I might produce doesn't reach to my expectations of what is standard. So thus my novel was one of the corpses left behind because I'm afraid of failing. And by living in that fear I am in fact failing... It's this wonderful ironic cycle I put myself in. It is almost as if I can never say I failed if I never try in the first place. But if my dream is to be a published writer then... well I have failed, haven't I? My want to return to my novel began with a camping trip. It was my friends birthday gift from her boyfriend. He had planned this elaboorate weekend. Well it wasn't as exciting as I had imagined but at some moment in the weekend we were all sitting aorund the camp fire and my friend asked about my novel. All i need is a tiny tug and the rocks that hold back the damn of my creativity gives way and everythign comes pouring out. I told her, her boyfriend, and my own about my novel. The two gents stayed silent but her enthusiasm for it ignited that desire to be published. But it was a tiny flame and barely got my pot of creativity boiling. It wasn't until I returned to the sookie stackhouse books that the process began to boil. I was reading through the rest of the first novel and was astounded that it had ever been printed. It is a mess in terms of thought and how it was written. Don't get me wrong, I adored it. The story is fantastic. But so much of it feels undone. It feels as if Charlaine Harris sits down and slams out a story without any real regard for plot or an overall story arch. It was while I was reading, thinking these very thoughts, that it occured to me that I am good at what I do. I'm not amazing and could use quite a bit of polishing but I know that I can at least do better than her. (I'm not saying she is terrible.) Well, I finished the third book and partially true to my word I pulled out the bankers box with all of my notes on my novel. I will begin to peruse them and put them into a binder so that everything makes sense and I have a full grasp of what all is taking place externally and internally in the story. I will be publishd, I promise you.