A black bear has hitting the apple tree on the edge of our back yard leaving lots of piles of lovely poop. So far, the dogs haven’t spotted him. (we haven’t either) The last bear I saw near our house, was off in the brush, watching us stroll by with the dogs. (I think I’ve mentioned that horrible day) Bears freak me out a bit. They’re huge. After two seasons here, I’ve still only run into two bears while on foot. I’m hoping that never climbs to three.
Onto the word count.
How to Sex Your Snake
Genre – Mystery
New this week – 564 words
Total Count – 39,087 words
Release date: Pre-orders Dec 10
Writing has sucked this last month. I’ve been running ’round in circles with rewrites since early Sept not liking any of the drafts.
Feeling really blocked, unlike the bear who has been scarfing down all the apples from our tree, I turned to one of my favorite mind-freeing activities that doesn’t involve rum.
Puzzles!
I love puzzles so much. Always have. One of my favorite memories of my dad is working together on a giant puzzle of a lion head. I think I was about 10.
So anyway, after about two weeks of non stop puzzling, I got back to the computer and churned out the rewrites. They went off to the retired cop and came back with a big thumbs up. I’m moving through chs 3-11 fixing a sentence or two here and there so that the changes make sense. I’ll be back to work on the ending of the book either today or tomorrow.
Goals from last time: Getting the rewrites done. It took long enough but it did happen.
Goals for next time: See, I didn’t write next week, since I’ve had some issues getting a blog post out every week. I have 8 chapters that need that final draft touch. If I can tackle each chapter over 2-3 days, I can finish by Halloween. Then the draft goes to my editor for a final pass. Once I get that back, approx mid Nov, I will implement the changes and then send copies go out to my format readers who will be looking for anything that was missed. (Not by my editor but by me not getting the change fixed correctly. My editor is a seasoned pro) Hopefully, the readers will be sending manuscripts back to me the first week of Dec. The book will then move into pre-sales on Dec 10. Sooner if the stars align.
Nanowrimo. Are any of you doing it this year? I love this event. It’s part of the reason I want to finish this month. I have enough of my outline for the next book in the series and I’d like to knock out a rough 1st draft in November. If you’ve never heard of nanowrimo, it’s national novel writing month. You write a 50k word book in 30 days. If you decide to do it, make sure you plan ahead and put together as much of an outline as you can. It will make the writing flow easier. Outlining always does. Now I’ve got to get back to work. Today is a double run day. (easy 3 miler this afternoon, yasso’s later tonight) We’re training for another half marathon.
Hope the leaves are beautiful where you are. (they kinda suck here. None of the gorgeous reds we had last year)
Write on,
Melissa
Melissa Banczak 
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