Today I plan to do revisions on a contemporary young adult novel that I’ve had in the works for ages. I’ve collected all the comments from my critique groups and am determined to start with chapter one and go through the entire manuscript until I am satisfied that it is the best that I can do and then start sending it out. I have not had time to tackle this project because in between I have been writing poetry and picture book manuscripts, traveling, entering writing contests, going to conferences and workshops, blah, blah, blah. No more excuses even though I have a stack of books that I have been dying to read.

MURAL

Also, at our recent SCBWI local chapter meeting, we wrote a letter to ourselves about the goals we hope to accomplish as writers or illustrators this coming year. We sealed it and it will be mailed back to us sometime in 2015 to see if we have indeed done what we said we were going to do. Kinda neat, huh? I wrote down a specific goal that I have in mind. Hopefully, I will stick to it. We’ll see.

To get you started on the right track, here’s a post, “50 Articles on Writing to Help you in 2015,” written on the Writer’s Digest blog by Brian Klems. It covers topics you might be interested in as a writer: (a) starting your novel, (b) structure, plot, and character, (c) nonfiction writing, (d) grammar, (e) publishing … and much more.  Now get to work!

“A writer ‘gets started’ the day he is born. The mind he brings into the world with him is the amazing machine his stories will come out of, and the more he feeds into it, the richer those stories will be.”—Lois Duncan