A New Year

Chase Marchand, My Step-Grandson

Sydney Jean Shoenke, 12-06-11

It seems the older you get, the faster time flies.  To a three year-old, a five minute time out takes forever.  To his grandma, he’s growing up way too fast.  How did it get to be 2012 and how is it that my sixty-first birthday is a week from today?  Except for a few aches and pains, I still feel like an eighteen year old.  And yet my kids are now complaining about being middle-aged and my eldest stayed home on New Year’s Eve baby-sitting her granddaughter!  Well, almost.  Her fiancé has older kids.  But to Sydney, we’re Grandma Lizzie and Great-Grandma Rochelle.

So, at the start of the year, it’s customary to make resolutions.  I’ve sort of given that up.  I will, however, set a few goals, personal and professional:

PERSONAL:  At some point this year I will stop losing weight and go on maintenance.  I haven’t determined an exact weight goal.  It’s somewhere in the vicinity of 135/140 maybe.  I at least want to be able to shop in the Misses section at a regular store.  So far, I’ve lost 130 pounds, but that was as of early December.  I may have lost more since then.

October 2004  Had to dig for 300# Photos

Last Summer.  Still Camera Shy

PROFESSIONAL:

1.     Promote more.  My publisher suggests we either set aside one hour a day or one day a week for promotion and I have not been very good about that.  We have four company Yahoo groups:  one for authors to support each other with promotional ideas, one to communicate with readers, one for us to chat amongst ourselves so we don’t clutter our support group with jokes and off-topic stuff, and a business loop for official announcements from our publisher so they don’t get lost amongst the chatter.  That’s because on any given day there are a couple hundred e-mails on each of the other groups combined.  By the time I get through those groups, there’s little time or patience left for the other chat loops or forums out there where I should be promoting my work.  I’m not really complaining.  I love the fact that MuseItUp Publishing, Inc. is so supportive.  There’s also a Google spreadsheet I can check any time to see how well my book is selling and where—a reaction to less scrupulous publishers.

2.    Publish at least one fifty thousand word book,

3.    Have a fifty thousand word book ready to submit by the end of next year in addition to the one I publish.  I’m a slow writer.  Each of my books (including my current WIP) was started over a decade ago.  I even cheated and did a rewrite from scratch using the characters in my WIP for NaNoWriMo and due to illness didn’t even manage to come up with fifty thousand words.  I reset my goal for thirty and barely managed that.

4.    So, next NaNoWriMo:  fifty thousand words!

As the British say, I think that should be enough to be getting on with.

Be here next week for a double birthday bash.  My publisher, Lea Shizas shares her birthday with Elvis on January 8, and I share mine with Judith Krantz on the 9^th!  Check in and comment to win copies of both my books.

My website:  http://www.rochelleweber.com

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