Tuesday, November 9, 2010

What's next?

More and more I’m feeling ready to have the writing and the revisions and the editing of my memoir be finished. I’m now looking at this final process the way I worked proposals. I have a deadline, and as I get nearer and nearer to it, I'm beginning to prepare myself for the proverbial pens down date. I'm even pretending I have someone breaking that red pen in half, just like I had to do with the engineers who wrote proposals. There is a beginning, middle, and end to this process. That's all there is to it.


When I worked proposals I was always happy close to the deadline. That meant I could move on to a whole other proposal project and work with an entirely new proposal team. Well that will be true for me soon -- at least temporarily. 


I started a novel before I got my memoir publishing contract, and I’ve put it aside for several months while I’ve worked on revising the memoir. But come January I’ll be back working on the novel. I’ve signed up for a UCLA extension online novel writing course. Luckily my instructor is also a friend and the person who taught the Writing the First Novel workshop I took last February, so she was willing to take me into her third level class without my having had the first two levels. Well, her prerequisite for the class is fifty pages and to my recollection I already have seventy. Of course the material needs a lot of fleshing out, and I need to honker down on the research, but I believe I have a healthy and credible start.  So, I’m excited. This class will last ten weeks, perfect timing in my memoir schedule. About the time the online class is over I’ll have to get busy with my memoir marketing work. 


That will seem like a whole other project as well.

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