I have returned from my holiday trip full of perilous flooding and pet drama, and I am beyond ready to be back in the thick of things.
Let's start with my writing projects. That's right. There are two now. I'm easing my way back up to full speed. I re-read my dragon story, to get myself pumped about it before taking another crack at querying. I braced myself for hating it, which would have been completely unhelpful while trying to get excited enough to sell it. But no. I really liked it. Maybe even more than the last time I looked at it. Distance does wonders. So does reading something that spent a year in editing.
That went well, but now I think it was at the detriment of the Firebird draft. I'd read a few chapters, then start writing on my draft...then slow down in my typing...then re-read what I wrote and make a face...then force myself to finish off my thought...then go back and read another chapter of the dragon story to make myself feel better. One was so good and the other was so bad. But the good news is that I'm done with my re-read and I can go back to writing my terrible first draft without having to deal with the comparison.
Let's start with my writing projects. That's right. There are two now. I'm easing my way back up to full speed. I re-read my dragon story, to get myself pumped about it before taking another crack at querying. I braced myself for hating it, which would have been completely unhelpful while trying to get excited enough to sell it. But no. I really liked it. Maybe even more than the last time I looked at it. Distance does wonders. So does reading something that spent a year in editing.
That went well, but now I think it was at the detriment of the Firebird draft. I'd read a few chapters, then start writing on my draft...then slow down in my typing...then re-read what I wrote and make a face...then force myself to finish off my thought...then go back and read another chapter of the dragon story to make myself feel better. One was so good and the other was so bad. But the good news is that I'm done with my re-read and I can go back to writing my terrible first draft without having to deal with the comparison.
The other half of all this, of course, are my reading projects. It's fun to call them projects. I've singed up for the 2016 Reading Challenge on Goodreads, with the goal to read 50 books this year. This is a low estimate for me, but my challenges here are to (A) mark that I did read things on Goodreads, which I completely forgot to do last year, and (B) review 50 books here on the blog. So this Thursday book review schedule is going to stick around. I'm already ahead of the game with a few reviews scheduled to go up over the next few weeks. This gives me a cushion of time during which I'm going to try a longer book. As you may know (or may not know because I don't talk about books I don't finish) I have an embarrassingly terrible track record finishing long books. On my Kindle, there are a bunch of unstarted novels on the first few screens, and then the last screen is full of books, the dots showing their lengths stretching the width of the screen. Those dots are filled in and heavy to the half way point, and then stretching thin and unfulfilled, marking the moment where I'd abandoned them. But it's a new year and in this time of wild declarations of change and growth: I can finish that whole gross backlog! I can and I will! I know it!
The second challenge is just fun and pointless. It's Reading Bingo!
More specifically, it's "Retreat's Reading Bingo Challenge 2014," which was posted along with a YA board. (You can check out mine in progress here so you can gloat over how much better you're doing than me.) There are other reading bingo cards out there, but this one looks the most professional, so I set out to find "Retreat's Reading Bingo Challenge 2016." A Google search produced Penguin Random House's Romance Book Bingo, posted in April of 2015. This card comes with the unfulfilled promise, "We’ll be featuring printable, themed Bingo cards seasonally." Now, I should point out that seasonal reading bingo cards excite me the
way monthly writing challenges excite me, in that they make me want to
put together a Tumblr or a Podcast and get a bunch of people to do it
with me, except I don't have the time to do that kind of thing. So I'm
bummed there's not a series of seasonal bingo cards readily available
for my use.
I then had a Google-fu breakthrough and found the "Reading Bingo Challenge 2015," which--you guessed it!--is Canadian themed!
...
...
At this point I decided no bingo board could ever top that and (just like Random House Canada stopped making them) I stopped looking.
Has anyone else signed up for the Goodreads challenge? What did you set as your goal? Does anyone else now want to do this reading bingo and all other reading bingos ever?
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