I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I’m ready to go back to having something to do other than sit around on my ass. I get this way sometimes. After awhile I just get bored of doing the things I usually do and want to go out and do something else. Of course, within two weeks tops, I’m going to be wishing the semester would just END, because I’ll be buried under schoolwork and job and trying to get The Recruited into fighting shape.
Looking forward to starting work, just because I’m looking forward to having some money come back into my hands. I’ve been broke and unemployed for so long that the thought of having extra cash makes me really happy. My goal is to make enough to buy books next year, and to pay my parents the now 1300 I owe them for tuition next year.
Everything is next year with me right now, maybe because that will be my final year of college and then I’ll be finished. My education will be complete–I have no intention of going onto grad school–and I’ll be forced to find a job in the real world. My goal is to have been querying a while by then, in the hopes that I’ll have snagged an agent before I graduate. Seriously, that would make me so happy. And for once, it seems to be a goal that’s within reach.
I’m so accustomed to setting goals for myself that don’t seem unreasonable until I start taking steps to get there. For once I’d like to set a goal and meet it by the time I say I will. Now’s not the time for screwing around. Sure, I’m a little burnt out on both my manuscripts right now, but by the time classes restart I’ll be dying to get back to work. Here’s hoping anyway. I still plan to enter the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, assuming my novel is reedited by that point. If it isn’t, I’ll just return to my goal of trying to query by summer.
Right now it’s harder to say whether the rewriting, editing, or research is kicking my ass more. I’ve been looking up agents, and reading over Ms. Snark’s blog again, just to make sure I’m not going to colossally screw something up. Once I have a certain number of agents–I think the magic number is either 150 or 30 pages on AgentQuery, whichever comes first–I’m going to go back and look at their websites, and go over their client lists, and read interviews. Anything that might give me a leg up is going to get done.
The way it’s looking now, I’ll be done with the rewriting/editing stage well before I’m done with the research, which is as it should be. I’m just trying to balance the two right now so I don’t devote more time to one than the other. This balancing act is going to get even crazier once I’m neck deep in school work. Let’s see if I can continue to juggle without dropping any balls.