Manuscript Monday #8

Manuscript Monday is a series of blog posts which chronicle the life of my manuscript. It follows the journey I take to turn my week old baby story idea into a fully grown, polished novel. Take the journey with me. 🙂

My 8 week- old manuscript:

Hi there! Happy Monday!!

I’ve decided I feel bad for Mondays. Nobody likes them. Nobody. Including me. How sad is that? But I’ve decided to change my attitude about them. I’ve decided to look at them the same way I look at the month of January and the first day of school…as a new beginning, a chance to start fresh. I’ve decided to approach Mondays as the day I get to determine how the week ahead will play out. Why feel so down on Mondays just because we have to go back to work? Instead, why not feel great because we get to go back to work? We get to do something productive. How amazing is that?

Now before you think I’ve gone all Candy Cheerful on you, I am at heart, a glass half- full type of person anyway. So it just makes me feel better to approach Mondays like this now.

Okay then, so on this Manuscript Monday I’m particularly cheerful, because my self- imposed hiatus from working on my middle grade manuscript is almost over. One more week and I think I’ll be back. Here’s why…

I wrote another 10,000 words this week on my first draft of my professional manuscript. It’s actually less than I had hoped, but as I drafted, I realized this particular first draft doesn’t need to be as long as my middle grade stories are. It doesn’t (and won’t) contain all of the business related content that it will have once I start revising. Yay! So this project is going better than I thought. The story is taking great shape and I’m pleased with the direction it’s going in. And as you all know, that is a great feeling!

The best part is, I’ll be finished drafting soon and as much as I enjoy drafting, I love revising. That’s where I can turn the story that I actually wrote on my paper, into the story that I actually intended to write on my paper. Again—yay!

That doesn’t mean I’ve haven’t been thinking about my new middle grade project. I have. Ideas have been swirling around in my head all week. I’m trying to give them a chance to settle though. Some will make it and some won’t. We all know how that goes. You have a brilliant idea as you fall asleep at night or even in the middle of the night, but by morning your head wakes from its foggy slumber and you think, Um, no!

So I’ll wait for these ideas to take residence in my brain, and in the meantime I’ll work on my work stuff. But it’s only Monday. I have a whole week to see how all of my writing endeavors will play out. And you do too! So why don’t you join me? Show Mondays some love. 🙂 Who knows what amazing words we all can create—starting today!