Still waiting……and reading…………plus nano and writing.

For those who are following my agent process, here’s a quick update.  Three agents out of the six I met at the San Francisco Writers Conference have not rejected me yet.  They have all or part of my novel Crossing Paths and I’ve heard………. nothing.  One more week and I’m going to start sending out blind queries to agents who say they like historical fiction and/or literary fiction.

 In the meantime, I finished reading Stieg Larsson’s book, The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I had asked last week why you keep reading and specifically mentioned this book.  Thanks for the comments.  It’s fun to hear the differing views on why we keep turning the pages.  For this book, I only kept reading because I’m a stubborn sucker.  I skimmed through the parts that were plainly boring.  The story got exciting in the last hundred pages.  And mind you, this is a 724 page book, so that was a lot to get through.  I’m glad I found out the ending, maybe.  It ends with a cliff-hanger and now I’ve got to read the next book to find out if the heroine survives.  I’m not ready to do that yet.

 Another thing I did this week is go back to my fairly new spy thriller.  I started writing it this past November, which is National Novel Writing Month (affectionately called nano).  There’s even a website devoted to it (http://www.nanowrimo.org/).  Last year, over 200,000 writers world-wide participated.  The idea is to start a new novel on November 1, write 1667 words or more a day and cross the 50,000 word mark by the end of the month.  If you register on the site, you have your own page with all kinds of goodies, including a chart to mark your progress.

 30,000 writers reached the goal in 2010.  No, I was not among them.  I wrote just over 35,000 words and that was okay.  A few things, like life, got in the way.  Participating definitely brought a new excitement into my writing world.  In fact, I think I might do it every year.  It’s not a bad way to spend November.  It’s amazing how much you can write when you decide to just sit down and do it.

I started the spy novel with a germ of an idea that I’d had FOR YEARS.  Don’t even ask why it took so long to start writing it.  Or why, after I wrote about half of it in November, I didn’t look at it again until yesterday.  It just is.  And now I need to get back to it.

I wrote this on March 30, sorry for the late posting.