Ugh.

Well. I have admitted it. In the yearly goals list, I have my first fail. I did not finish The Horses of Valdor. Frankly, my dears (by my dears I mean you, Fearless Readers!) I got bored. Bored to death. Not a good sign. So, I coasted the last few days and did... very little. For now, the Horses of Valdor is in the trunk. I don't know why it no longer works. I don't know if I broke it, or it was broke before I began. Regardless, the real project, the one I know has a future, is Spiritcaster.

I've heard back from my wonderful betas, and I'm going through their responses one at a time. I found plenty of other things to fix along the way. All of a sudden filtering and unnecessarily clunky phrases are just jumping out at me. And fantasy speak. Oh, the source of all that is purple! Begone lilac! Speak like a human, not a character in a bad Tolkien rip off!

The next phase, and the one that frightens me the most, is the query portion of our program. **shudders** I'm going to try and do it in small bites. This week, I'm going to get the "elevator pitch" down. Like most writers, it is very hard for me to boil my story down to its base chemicals. I just don't know what to include and how to get all the good stuff in without a bunch of run-on sentences or sounding like a fool. I swear, I'm never going to write another book without having the elevator pitch done FIRST.