Which one? Although I probably shouldn't brag till my source gets back to me. Which she hasn't, which gives me plenty of ways to continue being the Johnny Drama of the media world.

I just sent the final (I hope!) version of the proposal for Gothic Charm School 2 to my agent. Everyone cross your fingers that (1) my agent doesn't think I need to do any more tweaks, and (2) that HarperCollins says "Why yes, let's publish another book by that nice Goth girl".

Good luck Jilli!

I'm about to close up the hole left by my first major plot cut. Good bye Park District, Church Archives, Diane, Jon, and the collapsing tunnel.

Then I'm taking a break from new content and working on cutting out wordiness, repetition, and unnecessary narrative.

I know this thread is for original writing, but I'm so happy to be writing anything at all at the moment that I'm going to share my cautious glee at having a fic open and actually adding to it.

I wish I understood my brain. But at least it's poking its writing nose out of its lair again. Next step, learning how to lead it in the direction I want it to go rather than learning how to stay on and make something useful out of its ramblings. I'm thrilled that it's starting to ramble, but I'd really like to ramble in a specific direction.

I hope your writing nose leads you well.

I've started pulling out words and rephrasing some of the clunkiest language. Mostly I'm about cutting words right now, polishing will come later.

Editing away, though I didn't do much last night due to having to do the PTA newsletter. I starting again to wonder if chapter 1 and 2 should be combined once more. Chapter 1 is really shrinking under the weight of word removal.

Something else I'm doing is changing all my italicized text to a style instead of using formatting. I can't believe I was dumb enough to not do that in the first place, I almost always use styles for my formatting.

I didn't have a lot of time this weekend, but I did do some editing in the early chapters. The word count in what used to be chapters 1-7 has gone from 14,500 to 10,800. I did have time to read chapters 1 and 2 aloud to my wife and eliminated some awkward places and a couple of errors introduced by editing. I have a new respect for how easy it is to create continuity errors while editing.

I have put the latest chunk from my magnum opus Career Change/Advancement on LJ. All of a sudden, the writing works again. Three years is too long for a hiatus, and I wish I could figure out what was the trigger to make it work again. Then I could do it when/if the well runs dry.

It helps if I don't stop and think "What is a nearly-50-year-old woman doing writing fanfic?" Cause most of my brain is still in its 20s/30s.

I got feedback, and I may make a change based on it. I've made a couple of tweaks based on what he already gave me. He asked how G-rated I intended this to be which means he hasn't gotten to Chapter 32 yet.