Chapter A Day - Finale

Well, here we are again, fair readers.

Six weeks ago, I set up a personal writing challenge bigger than I have ever tried to accomplish:

One chapter every weekday for six weeks. This boils down through basic math to thirty chapters. I could have cheated and claimed twenty nine, considering the holiday but that wasn't in my original stipulation.

In that six weeks, I managed to take a three day vacation, contact fifteen agents, attend a graduation, find out and deal with the fact that my daughter has partial deafness, and walk twenty miles to fight cancer.

All of these things have pushed my writing pretty far away from my priority list and here I am on the other side of this personal challenge, looking back at the marathon of words asking myself, "How well did I do?" 

Just the other night, I was nearing the end of the line and only had twenty seven chapters of the thirty complete. Early into the challenge I fell behind. I fought against that struggle and I pulled a chapter ahead. Of course, though I tried, I couldn't maintain that lead. Just over a week ago, I fell very far behind and my determination pushed me to double my workload, putting me closer to being on the right track but I couldn't reach that point, no matter how hard I reached.

The last few hours ticked by and my keyboard was beginning to develop friction burns, wearing off the letters while I pounded out chapter after chapter. It was very strenuous but here I am, Officially on day thirty-one.

And I am here with thirty glorious chapters under my belt. These thirty chapters are for the second book in my SALAGIA chronicles which means the second book in my series is nearly complete. 

I'm not going to lie, I feel pretty damned accomplished right now. I look along the story I spent the last month crafting and I see a strong improvement in writing and in storytelling. This gives me hope. 

Hope that soon, an agent will find value enough in my books to help me share my tales with the rest of the world.

About deadlines.

So, as my faithful readers know, I am trying to write a chapter a day for 6 weeks. This boils down to one chapter for every weekday totaling 30 chapters. Well, last week, I ran into a huge SNAFU and shorted myself two days of writing.
This week, the holiday put me off and work put me off and so on.
This sounds bad and I am obviously falling behind. FAR behind. Tonight, I should have finished chapter 24 but just barely polished off number 18.

As I said, this sounds bad, but I've learned something interesting through this experience.
How to deal with deadlines. I know that, in the writing world, there will be times when you must achieve a specific quota to be successful and this challenge has put me in the mindset of having to complete a set amount of material in a specific period of time.

I'm not promising that I can complete this challenge but I am promising that I'll do my damnedest to make it. Now I need to stack on a few chapters so I can still win this fight.
Until next time-

Chapter A Day - Observations

Here I am, on day 14 of my "Chapter A Day" writing challenge. I know it's day 14 because I'm on chapter 14; convenient, ain't it.

As you faithful readers know, I've spiced up the writing challenge with an agent query touch. Every day, I am to query any one of my three books to an agent. In this area, I've had a couple observations, which I will share with you now:

1) When an agent boasts that she is prompt, the last thing I USED TO expect was a rejection letter in under twelve hours (much less, THREE).

2) If you cannot find an agent's company easily with a Google search, be wary.

3) If you try going to a literary agency's website and you get redirected to the Wordpress homepage, worry.

4) I ran across an agent that requested queries by e-mail only. When I clicked on their e-mail link, it was slushpile@[domain name].com- SLUSH PILE! This felt like a trap to me....

 Aside of that; this challenge has been a piece of cake. Big, fat, rejection flavored cake.

Until I write a gain....