Finished! Yay! And other stuff.

First the good news: I have already accomplished one of my 10 major goals for the year by finishing the first draft of my current novel, PENTACLES AND PENTIMENTOS, last Saturday. YAY! FINISHED! WOOT! (Ahem.)

The bad news, is that I did it last Saturday, and didn’t get around to blogging about it until today—a week later—despite my goal to blog more regularly. (Drat.) Still, there were extenuating circumstances, and at least it’s not as bad as my blog reporting on my NANOWRIMO experience last November…which I still have yet to write.

The extenuating circumstances were pretty major, too. The break-up of one of my most treasured and important friendships. Ouch. It really threw me, and I didn’t much feeling like “wooting” about the finished manuscript until now.

So I hope you’ll forgive me 

One of the casualties of the friendship imploding was my plan to go to the RT convention in Ohio at the end of April. My friend and I had planned to go together, give a workshop, socialize with some of our author and agent pals, do some networking, and celebrate my 50th birthday in style. She’s still going. I’m not.

So the new plan, probably, is to celebrate my birthday here in town with my lovely circle and a bunch of other pals, and maybe go to the RWA convention in July instead with best bud Robin. No half-naked male cover models (as there would have been at RT), but you can’t have everything.

Tomorrow my coven will gather at my house for a slightly belated New Moon project: putting together focus boards for the new year. This is a project we’ve done for the last two years, and it seems to work well for us. For those of you who have never made one, a focus board is simple: write down a list of your goals for the coming year, cut out words, phrases and pictures from magazines or catalogs that represent those goals, and paste them on a piece of poster board. Then put the focus board where you will see it on a regular basis, to remind you to focus your energy and intent on those goals. This year we will be adding something new: a joint focus board made by all the women in the circle, as a goal focus for Blue Moon Circle itself, to keep us moving in a good direction as a group.

Also on the agenda for tomorrow—start on the edits for PENTACLES AND PENTIMENTOS. Finishing the first draft—even a polished first draft—is only the start of the process. Now I sit down, reread the manuscript, and try to figure out what changes I need to make to improve it. More on that next time…

Hope you all had a wonderful (and trauma free) week.

Blessings, Deborah