What I Did This Summer

You already know that I moved. That was the big time-energy-money-attention monster that ate the first part of the summer. Since my last post I also:

~ Caught up on many bookkeeping/admin tasks. Much of my time goes to that, but it's not really worth mentioning here. Don't know why I've even typed this much about it.

~ Ate too many Hurricane Cookies, leading to thrice-weekly morning workouts with Jillian.

~ Renamed my "pre-published" novel: now "Lethal Blossom." Too soon to say how well that name will stick, but I'm liking it well enough.

~ Consulted my wonderful astrologer about an auspicious day to send out query letters to my most-desired agents list: turned out to be Aug. 17 at 10am, so I twiddled my thumbs and tweaked and retweaked and retweaked my letter/synopsis until I had to just stop looking at it.

~ Sent out query letters/etc. to said target agents on most-auspicious time/date, most by email, a few by snail post

~ Got three top-speed replies back: "Sorry, we're so busy with our current clients we don't look at submissions unless they've been blessed by the Pope, Stephen King, or Janet Evanovich." Such is life. I don't need 10 agents fighting over me, just one who really likes my stuff. Seven remain unheard from as of this writing, so that's still wide open.

~ Sent off for an entry form for the 2010 "Malice Domestic" competition. If no agent is delerious with excitement about my potential by Oct. 1, I'll give that a go.

~ Finally got around to joining Facebook.

~ Retrieved and reviewed my NaNoWriMo novel from 2005 -- the one that got set aside so I could write what is now "Lethal Blossom" (LB1)to which NaNovel '05 is the sequel. Much has changed during the writing of LB1, and much of NaNovel '05 is headed for a deadly encounter with the delete key. Fingers crossed there's enough left to give me a jump-start on a complete draft of the next one (working title "Lucky Bamboo" - LB2).

~ Got a Wordpress theme to use for my future author site. Don't have much of a clue yet what to do with it, but I'll be playing with that this fall when I need a break from working on LB2.

~ Downloaded a bunch of photos from Fotolia, for potential Wordpress site use.

~ Looked for free, interesting fonts online to use for Wordpress banner, maybe some headline graphics. Got as far as AbstractFonts, which is totally groovy, and only downloaded 37 of the 1019 in the "handwriting" category, which I think counts as remarkable restraint. It's trickier than you might think to find a font that's attractive and readable while also whispering "humorous mystery." Horror novelists have all the luck, as there are many fantabulous fonts that shriek of murder, mayhem, and madness. Not right for my stuff, though.

~ Oh, yeah. I also read a lot, as usual. And did some sewing.

Next up:

~ Try to remember how to install fonts so my font manager will recognize they're on the system.

~ Come up with some kind of a plot for LB2 before the end of October, in time for...

~ NaNoWriMo 2009. I may churn out nothing more than 50-60,000 (or more) words of drivel (it's happened before), but the group write-til-you-drop experience is too much fun to pass up.

Onward...