Plan for the Postponed Holiday Trip and Onward to 2016

This week has been chaos with a drawn out illness for our cat resulting in tears and questioned priorities and a postponed holiday trip.  Last night while making a pro/con list of two options I had with respect to the postponed holiday trip, I thought, "At least if we stay here to feed the cat through a tube, the baby can play Jesus in the Christmas pageant."  I can say with certainty that this is a thought I have never had before.  I think if there was a dark humor story in all this, that would be the jumping off point.

In other writing news, one of my New Year's resolutions (which are more Things To Do In January, just like I had Things To Do In December) is to get back to querying.

The complete list looks like this:

• Query
• Finish Draft of Firebird Story
• Sleep Training

Sleep Training, for those of you that don't know, is training the baby to sleep consistently, teaching him to soothe himself back to sleep instead of needing me to sing him progressively questionable lullabies, and breaking him of all the bad habits he's picked up about sleeping on me and sleeping in a swaddler and needing to eat to sleep.  When I think about how much of a nightmare this is going to be, it makes the first two bullet points look easy.  I'm in control of both of those.  I just need to buckle down and do it.

So I have a few prerequisite steps to take before jumping back into querying.  First, I want to re-read my novel and get hyped about it again.  Second, I want a better title.  I have one in mind, but I want to focus in on it and run it past some people.  Third, I want to take another look at my query letter and see how I can make it better.  With this much time away from it, I'm sure something will jump out.

Our holiday trip will be a great time to do these.  It's mostly reading, not a huge time commitment, and I can do them instead of working on my draft of the Firebird story and still make progress.