Tying Up a Bad Year, New Beginnings, & the Shatter Me Winner

The Shatter Me winner will be announced at the end of this post. It's just more dramatic that way.

It's the last day of 2011 with mere hours left until this year is over, and I can't say I'm sad to see it go. I would say it was a rough year for me in a lot of ways, but I think it was down right bad.

I started my first blog and finished my first ms in 2010. I knew my first ms wasn't good, but I also knew I would write again and project 52 would help me do it, because all the reading was teaching me things. I wrote another manuscript which I still love, and I don't mean some mature kind of love where I can love in spite of its flaws. I love it with the burning passion of a first love and it is so perfect it can have no flaws. Anyone who thinks otherwise just has bad taste. So you can imagine my surprise when even after 180 pages of cuts and about a year of revisions/edits it earned me 105 rejections. I finished project 52 with six hours of 2010 left and high hopes for 2011. Because my phenomenal ms was complete and sure to get me an agent, and I was half way through a third manuscript which in all reality should be even better. I mean I improved like ten fold between my first and second ms, why would it be any different between the second and third? Except, my third ms was so bad I couldn't bare to read it and only sent it to my CP after some degree of coaxing.

Now, I'm hours from the end of 2011 and rather than being elated I finished my project and am off to start a new life within the month (last year my husband and I moved to WI in Jan--I was excited about this until I realized it was horribly cold, Milwaukee is no bigger than Austin, and I don't like the food) I'm lamenting a year of a lack of accomplishments and loss. My grandfather, who I called dad until I was ten years old, because my own dad didn't feel a need to speak to me until I was 24, died 12 days in to 2011. No way to start a year. I miss my central/south Texas town, 50 degree winters, and tacos. I haven't exactly done anything to be proud of this year, and when you're an over-achiever, that's hard. But it's time to put all this behind me and go into a new year. Even if it's really bad 2012 cannot be worse than 2011, and my daughter should be here in May, which means I'll feel way better than I have for the past 5 months and have a baby girl to love. It's time to move forward.

So I'm starting a new Project 52, and in some ways I'm going into 2012 the same way I went into 2010--aiming to complete a project that will have only intangible benefits but most of all knowing what I want to do and wondering if the world will ever let me be successful at it. In other ways, this new year and revamped old project are completely different. I've learned a lot the last two years. I'm going into this with specific goals. Most of my rejection was because I just didn't fit anywhere. No where. One person told me "I'm stuck in cross-genre hell." A well respected editor told me I just can't be part one thing and part another. So now I'm looking for something I can love like YA yet a box big enough to fit my writing.  I also know my grammar isn't up to par to be a writer, so as soon as I find one I'm taking a grammar class.  It's scary and a little depressing to think that since 2009 other than having a few completed projects, I'm more or less in the same place. But it's also promising. I went into 2010 like this and had a good year. Maybe, 2012 will be as well.

Goals for 2012
finish adult novel by Feb. 1 (yes, it has no title)
send adult novel to 2 CPs by March 1 (this will mean finding one more CP)
Query adult novel by June
Rewrite Phantom Fires
Complete P-52 and either know I have a genre or should self publish
Eat Healthier & work out more
be a good mom
HAVE A BETTER YEAR!!!

I will quit complaining about 2011 and head off for greater frontier.

And the winner of Shatter Me is commutinggirl.