At the end of the school year, one of my kids brought home another fish. It was part of a project the whole class had been working on, the kids created little ecosystems from soda bottles - cut them, taped them, filled them with water and plants and critters. When the project was finished it came home, which translates to: we gained a fish, a snail and a cricket. Our house was already home to two beta fish. I didn't really want another fish. The cricket soon died, the water turned stagnant and we felt very sorry for the fish and the snail. We did the only reasonable thing, we bought another little aquarium and set it up for Bob and his shell toting side-kick. Just after lunch today, Bob gave birth to eleven baby fish.
When I have a few moments of down time, but not enough to be reading, writing or researching, I like to track down any advice I can find on writing. Recently, out of curiosity, I joined Twitter - not expecting to find much more than the light banter of social interaction but what I found instead was another source of knowledge. There are readers, first time and established writers, agents and publishers out there all shooting off tiny gems of advice and inspiration and links to websites and blogs. It's a gold mine, accessible one nugget at a time. And I can follow Ricky Gervais and laugh at his jokes.
Researching agents was fun when I started doing it last month. Discovering helpful blogs and agent interviews was exciting. Finding that they all want different things was interesting. Writing good query letters has been difficult. Sending out those query letters has been terrifying. Reading the replies (all rejections so far) has been like a roller-coaster. Kind words and encouragement to keep trying - YAY!!! Not what we're looking for at this time - Awwww!! Why can't the right agent just knock on my door? I'll invite her in for tea and she'll read my book in one sitting.
Spent the best part of a week going over my work... as off this morning I have edited and rewritten all the way through the first 19 chapters. They are not 'finished' but they are no longer first draft, the first three have been worked through 2 or 3 times now and nearing the point where I am totally happy with them. Now I have reached chapter 20.... I recently produced chapters 20-24 in first draft and I don't feel like looking at them again today but I know if I don't spend just a little more time on them it will bother me all weekend. I followed a link a few days ago (down the rabbit hole?) ... ended up on someone's blog. A lady who teaches and writes. Her blog looked awesome, lots of thoughtful musings, great links, cool quotes and interesting fun stuff. She talked about some writing software that she uses and really loves.. I checked it out and now I WANT IT! but it's $45 so not in my budget.. plus I worry that if I actually had this software installed on my computer I'd spend WAY too much time playing with the bells and whistles and 'getting ready' to write instead of just writing.
With my work in progress open in the background, I find myself trawling the forum looking for other things to read and think about.