Monday, January 12, 2009

Live & Learn

I've been thinking about my goals for this new year, 2009. I don't want to make any resolutions--they always come across as negative and things you're *not* going to do like smoke or overeat. No, I think goals are much more motivating.

One goal is definitely to finish my cozy mystery manuscript, make revisions and get it circulating with agents. And the sooner the better.

My other goal is to learn. I want to take some good books off my shelf and really study them--do the whole underline in different colored magic markers thing. I want to try "modeling" as described in Elizabeth Lyons' book Manuscript Makeover. And writing riffs from the same volume.

Once and for all I want to see, inside out, how accomplished authors put their books together. Then I'm going to use that knowledge to write another one of my own.

2 comments:

~ Mama~ said...

Hi Peg,

I'll have to try Manuscript Makeover. I didn't realize there was one I missed. LOL

Dianne

Kaye George said...

I didn't make any either. I can usually recycle all my old ones since they never get done - lose weight, exercise more, get published.

I did make monthly goals, though. It does me good at the end of the month to see if I accomplished any. Sometimes I can actually cross one off. It's more like a to-do list, I guess.

And I do have two novels to get finished and circulating on the list, too! At least one of them this year.

I've tried to take bits and pieces from my how-to-write books and just use what works for me. Someday, WHEN I get a novel published, I can maybe write my own!