A loose writing schedule. Because you know how well those always work out for me.

The Hero Factor mark-ups are finished, and here's the breakdown:

60 total scenes

12 of which will be brand new

and of which approximately 1/3 of those remaining will require extensive revisions

but the rest just need some tightening and grammar clean-up.

I wish that I had time to get the actual rewrites done before NaNoWriMo, and for about a minute I almost deluded myself into giving it a try. But realistically there's just no way, so I'm putting it safely away until January (because November is all about NaNo and December is all about recovering from NaNo), when I'll commence the re-writes, which I estimate will take me 4 to 6 weeks, depending on how busy I am in other areas. And even though it's supposed to be a "one pass" method, I'm still planning to show the next draft to a few people and then do another quick pass based on their feedback before I start querying on it. But I plan to have my query package ready to go by March. I'll spend that whole month on submissions, and then start editing the NaNo project in April, and right now I'm feeling ambitious enough to go ahead and say I'll get it revised and ready to query in time for next year's NaNo.

And that's the next year in writing, for me. It might sound like a ridiculous goal, considering that I've been working on Hero Factor since before I met my husband (which would be about 5 years); but I think I'm finally getting the hang of this whole "writing and editing a non-fanfic novel by myself without input and constant hand-holding by other fanfic writers" thing, so I don't think it's totally delusional of me to aim for two novels a year from now on, regardless of whether or not any of them ever get published. If nothing else, I can at least share them online with all five of my semi-loyal readers.

Speaking of which, the more time that goes by without any feedback on This Old Haunt, the more I think it was a mistake to have ever posted it in the first place, and I'm thinking of taking it down. I'm not trolling for compliments, I'm just sayin', and giving anyone who still wants to read it fair warning that it won't be up for much longer. I'll leave it another week or two for anyone who's in the middle of it to finish. But I've given it some thought, and even if it's passably entertaining, the almost complete lack of reader enthusiasm tells me it's definitely not a stellar example of my abilities, and leaving it up could hurt my chances of getting published in the long run. But hey, it was an experiment in the medium, and I'm glad I did it, because now I know that the serialized blog format is not for me. Neither is the podcast novel. I tried recording this one as a podcast and didn't get past two episodes because I kind of hated the whole process as much as I hate my own voice.

On Monday -- scratch that, make it Tuesday; Mondays carry too many work deadlines -- I'll start plotting my NaNo project. I'm going to give Holly Lisle's Notecard Plotting Method a try. Hopefully I can get it plotted out next week, and then give it another week to just simmer and stew in my noggin before it's time to commence the actual writing. Which, I'm thinking, will kick off at midnight on November 1st, since it's so conveniently situated on a weekend this year. I'm also thinking about getting Husband to go see Paranormal Activity with me on Halloween to ensure that there's no way I'll sleep that night, but I don't know yet whether we'll have the funds, and I also don't know yet whether I'm too chicken for that movie. Look, people, I still have nightmares about Samara. I honestly don't know if I can handle PA.

In non-writing news, I made doughnuts this morning, the easy cheater Sandra Lee kind my mom used to make where you take canned biscuit dough, poke a hole in it, deep fry it and then put it in a bag with cinnamon and sugar (or powdered sugar, but we didn't have any on hand) and shake well. And they were every bit as delightful as I remembered, even though I hadn't eaten one in at least 25 years. Man, I's old. And incidentally, that also makes some awesome easy cheater fry bread. Just leave out the bag full of sugar.

Now I'm gonna go get my domestic on and do some cleaning. And possibly some lazy Halloween crafting. Here's hoping the rest of you are having an enjoyable weekend.