Goals and Plans – Page 15 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Some thoughts on the future

I went to the first class of English 318 yesterday, and the lecture got me to thinking about my mid- to long-term future as a writer.

Brandon spent most of the period organizing the class, which was made doubly difficult by the ridiculously small classroom size. I swear, bureaucracies exist only to make life difficult. This year, for the sole sake of screwing with everyone, they are trying to limit his class size to thirty people (twenty students, ten auditors), but that’s a whole other rant in and of itself.

Oh well–at least there’s still room on the floor.

Anyhow, after getting all the administrative stuff done, Brandon talked about the practicalities of being a writer. He made the very interesting point that as a writer, it doesn’t matter where you live–moving further away from the city won’t negatively affect your earnings, unlike most jobs. That means you can save a lot of money on a house if you’re willing to live 50 to 100 miles away from a major population center.

That got me to thinking: maybe, once my writing career starts taking off, I’ll move down to southern Utah for a while. The country is absolutely gorgeous down there, and the people don’t seem hard to live with. Small house with lots of space, maybe a garden, lots of outdoor stuff all over, plenty of privacy–sounds great!

So here’s a tentative map of the next few years:

present–fall 2011: Get a job, build some credit, get TEFL certified. Keep writing, attend some cons (LTUE, Worldcon), develop new projects.

fall 2011–2012: Teach English abroad for a while (Korea, Japan, etc), build up some savings, have some adventures. Keep writing and submitting.

2013–2014: Get a teaching job in the Middle East (gulf region), have some adventures down there, continue to build savings and gain experience. Hopefully I’ll have broken in to publishing at this point; if not, keep on trying.

2015–2020: Come back to Utah (maybe Salt Lake), live off of savings for a while and really focus on building the writing career. Attend cons and workshops, network, write like crazy (the adventures will probably give me lots of material), work on promotion if I’ve already got a publishing deal, etc.

2020–????: Hopefully, somewhere along the line I’ll meet my wife and get married. Also by this time, my writing career will hopefully be earning me a living–enough, at least, to support a family. With all these things in place, we’ll select a home out in southern Utah, settle down, and start having kids.

That’s one plan, at least. When 2020 rolls around, I’ll probably laugh at my naive and short-sighted view of the future–but at least it’s something to work with.

Brandon did make the point that it’s not as hard to make a living as a science fiction & fantasy writer as most people say–which isn’t to say it’s easy, but it is possible.

According to Brandon, about 1,000 to 2,000 writers in sf&f are currently making a full-time living. Most of them are mid listers–authors you probably haven’t heard of, but see their books occasionally in the stores. If your books sell about 5,000 copies in hardcover over the first three years in print, your publisher won’t cut you–and with the way ebooks are changing things, new business models will certainly evolve, presenting a whole new host of challenges and opportunities.

Bottom line, this is something achievable, so long as I keep producing consistently and work hard to improve my craft. I’m very optimistic about the long-term.

Now, all I need is to find a job…ugggggggh.

(image courtesy Postsecret)

Q4 report, 2010

For those of you who don’t know, I do a report on my blog at the end of each quarter, giving a progress update on my writing. I like to think it helps me keep things professional. Whether or not it does, it’s certainly helpful to look back on how I did.

So anyhow, here’s the word count chart:

The red line represents daily word count, and the blue line is a running total for the previous seven days. The chart includes revisions as well as original material; for revisions, I just do a wordcount of the finished version, whether or not I’ve cut out significant chunks of the text or left it largely as-is. Maybe that skews the picture a bit, but it’s the best I can do with the tools I have.

At the beginning of the quarter, I was working 40+ hours per week at a seasonal job, so the writing was pretty slow, averaging a little less than 15k per week. My main project was the fourth draft of Mercenary Savior, which I was struggling to get ready for World Fantasy.

The job ended October 28th, and I didn’t do any writing during the conference, which is why you see the dip at the end of the month. But I took November off to work entirely on my writing, which is why things took off again rather quickly.

That huge peak in the middle of the quarter is from the fifth draft of Genesis Earth, which I completed in about two weeks. The draft was already pretty well polished, but one of my hard sf friends did a read through and got back with a few major science issues which I needed to rectify. Also, I figured it was in need of a language polish, since I finished the last revision almost a year ago and my writing (I hope) has improved a lot since then.

I was pretty surprised at how quickly it went. The book is definitely as good as I can make it, and any further revisions without professional editorial assistance would be a less effective use of my time.

Things dropped off rather sharply, however, because I spent all of Thanksgiving week either on the road or with family. Ah, how I love road trips…but they sure can throw a kink in the writing schedule. I also had a hard time settling on my next big project, which is why things took a while to take off again after I got back.

After starting a sequel for Mercenary Savior and toying around with a short story idea, I decided to do a major overhaul of Worlds Away from Home. Unlike GE, however, WAFH really, really sucks. It took me two weeks just to read through the rough draft and pick out all the troubled spots, after which I rewrote the outline from the ground up and decided to completely scrap half the book. I started the second draft in mid-December, but it’s taken a while for things to really build steam.

Right as I was starting WAFH 2.0, a couple of other writer friends from World Fantasy got back to me with their comments on Mercenary Savior, and pointed out a few problems that I hadn’t noticed before. I started the revision on December 21st and have been plowing through ever since. That accounts for the huge spike at the end of the quarter–like GE 5.0, the draft has a lot fewer story problems, but does need a few things fixed for consistency, as well as a language polish.

Overall, I wrote or revised through about .25 million words this past quarter–some of which were easier than others. I started a new project (Into the Nebulous Deep), polished one of my manuscripts to the very best of my abilities, and made significant headway on revising and polishing two others. In terms of publications, I had a major article published in Mormon Artist, and a short poem accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of Leading Edge.

Not a bad quarter. Now, let’s see if I can find an agent and/or publisher in 2011.

The Obligatory New Year’s Post

So I guess I was lying when I said that my last post was the second to last post of the year. Oh well–better late than never, I suppose.

Last night at a party, I told someone that 2010 wasn’t that bad…but it was also the worst year of my life. I suppose that’s true: I got kicked out of my Washington DC internship, almost failed all my classes, spent most of the year unemployed, and never quite achieved full financial independence.

At the same time, I made a bunch of new friends, started two novels and finished another, published an article about the BYU sf&f community that’s garnered some major attention, and generally had a fun time, in spite of the setbacks.

So really, what is there to complain about? Not much. Still, I’m glad it’s over.

As far as new year’s resolutions go, I’ve found that the best way to do them is to make one or two of them–otherwise, come February, you lose steam and none of them get done.

I’ve got a couple private resolutions, but here’s the big one I want to focus on:

Resolved: Read a minimum of one book per week.

I made this resolution back in 2008, but it only lasted until mid-March or so–not so much because I wasn’t reading, but because I didn’t understand how I read.

I’m not the kind of person who finishes every book they pick up; in fact, I only finish about 3/4s of them. If I don’t think a book is good, I stop reading it. Sometimes, even if a book isn’t bad, I end up putting it down just because I lose interest. I’m also really picky; I don’t usually read any fiction that isn’t fantasy or science fiction, because the real world bores me.

At the same time, though, if I want to write well, I’ve got to be constantly reading. And as I’ve written book reviews for this blog, I’ve found that reading widely has helped me to hone my craft.

So anyway, that’s my major resolution for this year. Other things I would like to do:

1 ) get Army fit
2 ) live in another country
3 ) write a novel entirely in longhand, with actual pen and paper
4 ) get three new publications (two are already in the works)
5 ) fall in love with someone–and then make it grow into real love
6 ) get a MIDI keyboard and compose original 8-bit music
7 ) get a digital SLR and become an amateur astral photographer
8 ) get an agent
9 ) land a publishing deal
10) honestly, it’s just an honor to be read

Do these goals sound a little outlandish? Sure…but who cares? We’ve got a whole new year in front of us; anything can happen between now and December 31st!

Happy New Year!

The second to last post of the year

I’ve been figuring out what to say in my Obligatory New Year’s post–resolutions and all that. Before I do that, though, I wanted to give an update on recent goings-on.

First, the writing: I’m making excellent headway in the latest draft of Mercenary Savior, and should be finished by the end of next week. WAFH is coming along too, but at a much slower pace. It’s hard to juggle a good book that only needs a polish with a crappy book that needs a complete overhaul, because the one that needs the most work looks so much worse in comparison. Still, I’m making progress on both.

I just recently noticed, though, that I’ve spent the last two years working almost exclusively on Mercenary Savior. Whenever I took a break to work on something else, it was never more than a month or two before I jumped into another major revision of that project. I worry that that’s going to handicap me, especially as I reach the point of diminishing returns. Mercenary Savior is an awesome novel, and I totally stand by it, but I worry…well, I worry too much. Let’s just leave it at that.

Second: jobs! To my surprise, a number of places have been calling me in for interviews and such. My first pick would most likely be with the BYU Political Science Department, since I already know everyone there and would probably love it. However, a number of other opportunities have been opening up, which means (inshallah) that I’ll probably be employed by the end of next month. Woohoo!

In the mid- to long-term, though, I’m thinking very seriously about teaching abroad. I interviewed today with a program that places people in South Korea, and that could be quite interesting. If I choose to go through with it, I’d probably be shipping out in September, hopefully after completing a TEFL certification program. After working there for a year or two, I could probably land a much more lucrative job in the Gulf, which could be an interesting experience.

Then again, I could stay here in Utah, where I’m much more likely to find a wife…

But you know what? I’m starting to think that that’s a horrible reason to stay here in the bubble. I don’t need to live in Utah to find the right girl (or, as my dad says, for the right girl to find me). She could be anywhere.

And as for all that stuff about the odds being better out here, I’m starting to think that’s a bunch of crap. Yeah, there are a ton of young, available LDS women here in Utah–but there are also a ton of guys, and the competition has like a gazillion advantages on me. I mean, come on, I’m a writer–what have I got on a Marriott School graduate? Even a pizza can feed a family of four…

So maybe I should spend some serious time abroad, even if it does mean fewer dating opportunities. In the meantime, I need to renew my passport and get a job. And who knows what the future ultimately holds? Maybe I’ll stick around. Maybe…

Out of it

Man, I feel like I’ve been so out of it recently. I’ve been getting up around 9 am or 10 am every day, going to bed every night around 2 am or 3 am, and running around so much that I hardly seem to have time to write. Life is good, and between plasma and phone book deliveries I’m earning enough to get by, but my days are very unstructured and that’s not good for my writing.

So here’s what I need: a stable job that facilitates my writing. For the past year, I’ve been working random odd jobs and temporary jobs, and while they pay enough to get by (just barely), the variability and lack of long-term security is just too much to juggle on top of writing. I’ve got to find something else.

Trouble is, I’m afraid that if I settle for a dead end job, it’ll put such a stigma on me that I won’t be able to get a better job later if the writing career doesn’t take off. I’m pretty confident that I’ll eventually be able to make a living off my writing, but I don’t know how late or how soon that’s going to happen. The last thing I want is to end up as a wage-slave without a future.

Anyway, despite the lack of daily structure, I really love the flexibility that this phone book delivery job is giving me. Pay is on a per route basis (like newspaper delivery), and the supervisor is really awesome and easy to work with.

If I want, I can take the mornings easy, do personal chores for a while, deliver a couple hundred phone books and write in the evenings. That’s basically what I’ve been doing these past three weeks.

I really hate going to bed and waking up late, though. That’s not sustainable. If I come to my writing only at the very end of the day, it’s going to be a wash. I might get a thousand words in, but if I’m not consistently crossing the 2.5k threshold every day, my heart really just isn’t in to it.

In any case, WAFH 2.0 is coming along fairly well. I’ve got a good idea where I want the story to go, and the characters seem to be working out. Also, I think I’ve found my big reason for wanting to write this story–I’ll write more about that in a later post.

This next draft isn’t going to be perfect, but hopefully I can get rid of all the major story problems (and there are a TON of major story problems!). I suppose my goal at this point is to make it good enough to send out to my first readers. The rough draft is so full of crap, I wouldn’t let anyone read it if they paid me. Blegh!

Also, I know it’s only been a month, but I think I’m going to do another cover to cover revision of Mercenary Savior in the next few weeks. I really want to get it polished enough to start sending it out–preferably by the end of the holidays–so that’s probably going to take priority. If it goes as fast as Genesis Earth 5.0, I should have the entire manuscript done in about three or four weeks.

And another thing–I’m going to set a new goal: submit at least one thing to an agent/editor every week. Right now, I tend to go on splurges where I’ll send out half a dozen queries, then sit around for a month without really doing much to try to break in. I feel like I need to be more consistent on that front, because submitting is definitely one of my greatest weaknesses. They say everything comes better with practice, so I might as well send stuff out more regularly.

Anyhow, that’s how things are going right now–disjointed and all over the place, but somehow things still get done. I just wish I could get more done, but who doesn’t? Anyhow, there’s always next week–may it be better than the last.

Thanksgiving report from Texas

So for Thanksgiving this year, I drove down with my sister and brother in law to have Thanksgiving in Houston with my other sister’s family. It’s Friday night, and I’m about to hit the sack to get prepped for the long 24+ hour drive back to Utah, but let me say, this vacation has been great!

It’s so good to spend time with family, especially when you live across the country and can’t see each other very often. My niece has grown so much in the past year, and she is so freaking cute it’s unbelievable. Earlier tonight, we were watching slide shows on my sister’s projector and playing around with my niece: “Where’s Aunt Dot? Where’s Oopah? Where’s Uncle Joe?” Heh, Uncle Joe. I will do my best to live up to the awesomeness of that title.

Thanksgiving dinner was AMAZING. Holy freaking crap, my sisters can cook. They put together a traditional dinner from scratch, and everything was perfect. I’m so glad they’re sending a bunch of leftovers with us on the drive tomorrow, because I would much rather subsist on that than random junk food from gas stations.

Besides family, though, one of the coolest parts of the vacation was visiting the Houston Space Center and seeing mission control and one of the original Saturn V rockets. That’s right–see that room in the picture? I was there.

Which immediately begged the question: Why am I not in space right now? Seriously, I would do just about anything to go up in space. Thinking about the Pilgrims made me think about colonizing other planets, and how the difficulties may be similar and yet different. It also made me think about my latest novel, Into the Nebulous Deep, which (I’m hoping) is a colonization story set in space, and how I can use some of the stuff from the Pilgrims in my own work.

Speaking of which, the writing has been going very slow recently. A lot of it has to do with interruptions from the vacation (which frankly are more important), but it also has to do with my growing frustrations with the current project. I’m about 15k in the rough draft of ITND, and…it just doesn’t seem as good as my other work. Of course, it’s just a mental thing–none of my rough drafts has ever been any good–but man, it’s tough to get through.

To complicate things, I’m going to have to find a job for the Christmas season, at least to tide me over. I’m really hoping to get that wilderness job, but the training starts January 13th, and I don’t have the funds to spend all my time writing, like I have this past month.

I’ll know for sure the first week of December whether I’ve been invited to the training–and if I am, it’s going to throw a real kink in my writing routine. Each job shift lasts a full week, during which time I’ll be completely unplugged, living in the wilderness. I might get some time to work on poetry or short stories, but no novels.

The upside is that I get six days off completely free to do whatever I want, but I’m worried that it’ll be difficult, at least at first, to regain sufficient momentum in that short time. I’m sure I can get used to it eventually, but for the first few months, it will probably be tough.

For that reason, I want to get as far in ITND as I can before January 13th, perhaps even finish it (HAHAHAHA!!! As if that’s going to happen). So the fact that I haven’t progressed from this one scene for like a week is really killing me. Throw in a temporary job for the Christmas season, and I’ll probably go crazy.

That’s what my writing angst says, anyways. In other words, everything is fine and life is great. Now I’m going to get some sleep before driving across the freaking country all day tomorrow and Sunday. Night!

Almost at four

I’ve got half a dozen things I could blog about, but it’s 2 am and cleaning checks are tomorrow, so I think I’m going to give a quick update and go to bed.

Worlds Away from Home is doing quite well–I’m only two chapters and five scenes from the end. I’d push really hard to finish it tomorrow, but I’m still waiting on some of my alpha readers for Mercenary Savior and probably won’t start that project until after I go back to Massachusetts at the end of the month.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seven point story structure Dan Wells talked about at LTUE 2010 (which I missed, but caught on youtube), and I’ve got a TON of ideas for Mercenary Savior now. I’m practically chomping at the bit to start analyzing this story and working out all the complex plot and character elements. That’s very good.

While chatting with one of my alpha readers for Mercenary Savior, I had an interesting idea for a direct sequel. Basically, while James’s storyline has some closure (or should, after I finish this next revision), he’s still got a lot of growing and maturing to do. My mind is already working it out…should I make that my fifth novel? Or move on to something else first? The thing about direct sequels is you can’t sell them without the first book, and if the first book doesn’t sell…

I’m applying for Redcliff Ascent; if all goes well, I’ll be participating in the November training (since September is full). At first, I was hesitant about this (since I kind of need a job now), but looking at it now, that’s probably the best time to do it. It’s after World Fantasy, which gives me time to finish Mercenary Savior, and late enough in the year that I can still finish that article for Mormon Artist. Plus, I can easily get a schedule that allows me to attend LTUE 2011. The only disadvantage is that I won’t be able to attend all of Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 classes, but that’s not such a big deal (seeing as I’ve taken the class twice already!).

Other than that, life is good. I’m going home in a week to see my parents and get my teeth done (since my mom’s health insurance covers me until my birthday in September–why pay for a checkup when you could have it for free?), and I’m definitely looking forward to that. And now that I’m almost finished with Worlds Away, I can see that it’s got potential, and that’s encouraging. Not this draft, certainly, but once I fix all the holes, it could really go somewhere.

Either way, it’s going to be nice having four novels under my belt.

End in sight

Things are winding down for my current work in progress, Worlds Away from Home–or should I say winding up, since I’m just a chapter or two from the major climax? In any case, by the end of the week, inshallah, the rough draft will be finished. <crosses fingers>

It’s been tough, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to salvage it, probably sometime after World Fantasy 2010. Drafting is not my strongest point; I’m much better at revision. My goal is to have a fully polished draft before the end of 2011.

As far as the real world goes, things are starting to come together as well. I’m going home at the end of the month to get my teeth checked before my Mom’s insurance no longer covers me, and when I get back this temp agency should have a warehouse job lined up for a while, if I can’t find anything else. I’m cautiously optimistic that my sister will help me get a job at the residential treatment center where she works, which would be awesome, and of course there’s always the possibility that BYU will lift the hiring freeze (pretty soon, they’ll have to).

So here’s my plan for the next few months: quit my job at the call center and go home in two weeks, then either work through the temp agency through September/October or find something better. The wilderness job I was looking at has their training in November, so I’ll start the application process now in order to have that option in case everything else falls through. And if all else fails, I’ll go teach English in Asia for a year.

Meanwhile, I hope to stay in Utah until at least February, preferably until April. There are a lot of good resources here for writers, and I hope to take advantage of them. After I finish the rough draft of Worlds, I will throw everything behind Mercenary Savior and get it polished in time for World Fantasy 2010.

And then? Who knows. I’d kind of like to try my hand at a fantasy novel; I’ve got the start of an idea for a magic system, and enough knowledge of Middle Eastern history to throw in a sweet medieval Arab flavor in the mix.

In terms of the real world, my plan is to reteach myself Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus using some excellent resources my Dad is sending me, then go back to school in a hard science…probably. Still not sure what I want to do school-wise, but hopefully I’ll figure that out in the next year or two and head back soon.

That is, if I don’t get published and launch my writing career by then.

So that’s what my life is looking like right now. If you’re still reading and aren’t bored stiff (or if you just skipped to the end of the post, which is what I would have done), here’s an excellent song from one of my favorite Celtic bands, The Rogues:

If it kills me

I will finish this novel if it kills me. At the rate things are going, it just might.

Things are kind of tough for me right now. I desperately need a new job–the one I’ve got is slowly sucking away my soul without even paying enough to get by–and job rejections are way worse than rejections from publishers (I’ve been getting a lot of both, by the way. Not that I’m looking for pity, but yeah.).

As if that weren’t bad enough, my current novel, Worlds Away from Home, is turning out to be a train wreck. There are all sorts of problems with character motivations, improper foreshadowing and plot set up, etc etc. That makes it REALLY hard to get motivated to write each day. Yesterday, I wrote only 245 words (youch). Today, I did about 2.2k, but that’s still way less than I need to be doing.

The thing that worries me the most is the thought that the audience for this particular story may be slim to nonexistent. It’s solid space opera, but with a romantic element that challenges a lot of the mores of our modern, sex-saturated society, as well as many of the conventions of romance within science fiction.

The main female protagonist is something of a pushover–but she has to be, in order for her growth arc to have any umph. The main male protagonist is an orphan on a quest to discover his own origins, kind of like a cross between Mogli and Pip. His quest, combined with her parents’ manipulative attempts to get them physically intimate too soon, are the main things keeping them apart.

But in a genre where physical intimacy usually marks the romantic climax, how do you make it out to be the obstacle against that climax? Will science fiction readers go for that, or will they hurl my book across the room because of it?

Well, if they hurled my current draft, I wouldn’t blame them one single bit. So many plot holes and awkwardly written scenes–ugh. I’ve got to seriously rethink so much about this story. But a later draft? I don’t know–maybe it would work. It would probably need other hooks to keep them engaged, such as cool world building elements, but I think I could make those work.

Anyway, I suppose it’s nothing unusual. For every book I’ve written, I’ve come to a point in the rough draft where I thought the story was completely unworkable and should be scrapped. It’s a tortuous, masochistic process, but I suppose it’s normal. That’s some comfort, at least.

My goal is to finish this abomination by August 15th, then move on to polish Mercenary Savior and make it really shine.

Another goal is to get a decently paying job (at least $8/hr at +25 hours per week) in order to afford to go to DragonCon in September. Another goal is to reteach myself algebra and calculus through the math books my dad (who is a geometry teacher) is letting me borrow. Another goal is to actually get a social life. BLARG.

Second Quarter 2010 report

As you may or may not know, I keep a spreadsheet of my daily word counts. Nerdy, I know, but you’d be surprised how helpful it can be with keeping goals and staying motivated. As part of that, I’ve decided to do a quarterly report here on my blog. Here’s my report for April 2010 through June 2010:

The red line shows my daily word count, and the blue line shows a running 7-day total.

At the beginning of April, I was somewhere in the middle of writing Mercenary Savior 3.0. I was also in the middle of a long and strenuous debacle with BYU’s Washington Seminar. Long story short, I got kicked out under disputed circumstances.

Anyway, that explains the sharp dip in the first couple of weeks. I returned to my parents’ house in Massachusetts on April 6th and spent a week there before moving out to Utah; that explains the short lived bump from April 6 to April 12.

So three weeks before graduation, I came back to Utah with no job, no apartment, no transportation besides my own feet–nothing. Fortunately, some friends helped me out, and for the rest of April and most of May I at least had transportation (bike) and a roof over my head.

Without a job, I had lots of writing time, and I used it well, as you can see. The sharp dip at the end of April corresponds with graduation, when all the family was over and I was spending most of my time with them.

Things dropped off the second half of May, though, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was writing fatigue? I was coming up on the end of Mercenary Savior, and as I remember, the revision was fairly tough. Also, I was stressed out about not having a job, and spent much of my free time looking for work. I found my current part-time job at the end of May, and had a few spikes, but my output never totally recovered.

As an experiment, I took a week off from writing after finishing Mercenary Savior on the first of June. I thought that this would help me recharge my creative batteries and get off with Worlds Away from Home on a good start. Instead, I found that taking the time off made it harder to get back into creative writing mode, and so I struggled for the first week or two to really get that project off the ground.

Lately, I’ve been trying to bump up my output above 10k per week, without much success. For some reason, I seem to have fallen in a rut where I can’t write more than 2k per day. 2k is good, but it’s not the level where I want to be. I want to finish Worlds Away from Home in the first couple weeks of August, so that I’ll have plenty of time to polish Mercenary Savior for World Fantasy in November.

I think that part of the problem lies in the nature of the work. Mercenary Savior was all straight up revision, with very little new content. Worlds Away from Home, however, involves a ton of new content. Yes, I’ve got all that stuff I wrote back in the fall of 2008, but I’ve also added a new viewpoint character and significantly changed the basic storyline. Only about half of the old stuff is recyclable, and I’ll run out of it in 100 pages, roughly at the midway point of the novel.

After revising for so long, it’s hard to get used to writing a first draft. I’m not sure how to describe it, except that it takes a lot more mental energy–a LOT more. Plus, there’s always the nagging voices that tell you what you’re writing is crap–and when you’re writing your rough draft, the voices are usually right! Tuning them out is starting to be a challenge.

Overall, though, I’m very optimistic. My main goal is to produce one solid, polished novel a year, and I’m still on schedule to accomplish that. Mercenary Savior requires AT LEAST another revision before it’ll be good enough to send out to editors and agents, but I’ve got half a year to do that. As for 2011, I’ll almost certainly have the first or second draft of Worlds Away from Home before January 1st. Things are going well.

And on that note, I think I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. Night.