Doing Revisions and Working on a New WIP

I'll admit that I took a couple of months off this past summer. Our house was on the market (unsuccessfully, I might add! Obviously, the housing market is less than ideal right now). I had strangers tromping through at (literally) a moment's notice. Lots of, "Okay! Let's throw those Barbies in the toy chest and go to the park!!" at the drop of a hat. Add in the vacations and family visits and it really wasn't a conducive time to do a lot of writing.

But I discovered something. If you don't write nearly every day, writing doesn't come as easily to you when you come back to it. It's sort of like an underused muscle.

Now I'm in the middle of doing revisions for the book coming out next year (for a new publisher) and working on the new book in the series. I'm starting to get my groove back, but it took a couple of weeks of pure work. Even if I felt like my writing wasn't up to par, my ideas were out on paper and I knew I could go back later and edit them into something much better.

Now some writers might find reading industry blogs a real distraction. I'll admit that it's tempting to surf the net instead of slugging out your daily pages. But if you subscribe to the blogs' feeds, you can just read them when they're updated. And so many of them have great information. There are lots of great websites for writers. Here is a cool site that I've enjoyed lately: http://queryshark.blogspot.com/ ---You'll feel good about the query letters you've sent in! I like to edit these queries as I read them, which probably places me in the "disturbed" category.

An interesting idea that might appeal to many writers: organizing your writing with a wiki. This might sound a little scary, but you can make wikis that aren't shared out--that are private to your computer. Here's a blog article on creating a writing wiki: http://writerunboxed.com/2008/08/28/organize-your-novel-with-a-wiki/ If you've used a wiki for writing or if you give it a try, let me know how it goes! There are definitely parts to this that sound interesting to me if I find time to set it up.