I don’t write book reviews — I’m not a fast reader — but when I find a book that I really love, I like to write it. Today’s book recommendation is for Gayle Forman‘s young adult novel If I Stay. I discovered this book when Gayle was a speaker at the Teen Book Con in…
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Manuscript update: I miss it! I miss working on my story. But I got another book idea yesterday, so that’s exciting. I’m trying to refrain from running off into another book just yet, though, as I’ve still got the query letter and synopsis for my current book to perfect. Please note in the sentence above…
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Revision update: Got through two chapters yesterday and one and a half today. I’m really hoping to get the whole book done by the end of the year, but … hmmm, not sure. We’ll see. My husband said he’d read the book this weekend, which hopefully will give me a boost in my revision. He’ll…
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Revision update: Finally on chapter 9. Ok, so you know how I keep saying I’ve figured out what I needed to do to fix the problems I was having with my first eight chapters? Well, something was still nagging at me. We were still taking too long to get into the real meat of the…
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Done today: nothing so far Revision remaining: 46,313 words (entire book) Daily words needed to be finished by end of November: 908 I’ve been feeling very unmotivated lately since our dog passed away, and I’m trying to snap out of it. But I’ve pretty much done nothing on my revision since I last posted on Day By Day…
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Current word count: 21,859 New words written: 966 Words til goal: 18,141 / 422 words a day til the end of September Another good writing morning. Yay! I’m at a strange part of my story for me. My characters have moved to a different world, and I haven’t created a different world before, so it has been…
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Current word count: 19,901 New words written: 1,067 Words til goal: 20,099 / 436 words a day til the end of September I had a good writing day and made my weekend goal in one day. Yay! Hopefully I can do the same tomorrow. We’ll see. The story is coming together again now that the characters…
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Current word count: 18,262 Words written today: 267 Words til goal: 21,738 / 444 words a day til the end of September No kick up the you-know-whats for me. I knuckled down and got back to the first draft I’ve been working on. My daily word goal has risen because of my break, but I really…
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Current word count: 8,453 Words written today: 710 Words to goal: 41,547/462 per day til end of September I woke up too late to write yesterday, so had two days of no writing. It made me determined to get up early this morning, and I rolled out of bed a little after 5. Ugg! I’m now…
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Once I finally had a query letter I was happy with, it was time to write a synopsis. In the past, I had thought it would be easier to do it the other way around — write a 4- to 6-page synopsis of my novel, then write the 1- to 3- paragraph query blurb; work…
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