With Labor Day weekend about to start, I started thinking about other upcoming holidays and events in the shockingly-not-so-distant future. I also discovered the website http://dayzeroproject.com/ yesterday, which reminded me that constantly having and setting goals and deadlines is a pretty good thing to do. Author Natalie Whipple also had a terrific post about self-imposed deadlines and goals the other day, which only added fuel to the already bubbling brain fire.

What kinds of dates and deadlines am I talking about? A few with varying levels of importance to me and the world. In X days from now, it’ll be…

58 days – November 1st, the start of NaNoWriMo. (That means 57 days until Halloween and 64 until my birthday. So that will be a fun week.)

89 days — December 2nd, the first night of Hanukkah. (It’s surprisingly early this year!)

112 days — Christmas. (That’s 16 weeks, kids! Start yer shoppin’!)

119 days – 2011. (Eeeeeek. Where did 2010 go? Isn’t it still 2008, or 2003? I’m so confused…)

I’ll let you all take those numbers in. For a minute. We still breathing? Good!

I’m thinking of goals and numbers and planning because I need to set some goals for myself independent of all of the other Things of Potential Import ahead of me this fall. (Namely, the submission of Bound Between.) I’m looking at this fall and feeling ambitious. I want to accomplish a lot. That Back to School eager excitement has gotten to me and it’s making me want to work. But I haven’t set myself any deadlines yet.

I start my countdown list with NaNoWriMo because I’ve won it the last two years because I’d planned the project I was going to write — in a vague sense — in each year’s respective September. This is the first November in a few years I’m not certain I’m going to be able to participate (what if Things of Potential Import preclude my participation? I just don’t know!), but I’m planning on it anyway. There’s nothing like a community of writers encouraging each other — and that daily wordcount update graph! It’s so energizing! (And the 50,000 word goal? I’ve hit a personal best of 70K-ish in a month before, so I’m not worried. She says overconfidently…) So if I end up working on NaNo, I’ll participate in true fashion and start something new (either a new project or a new rewrite). I’m looking forward to that. If I don’t, then I’ll be working my butt off on something older or meatier, and probably working just as hard on it. That will be fun, too. Either way, I am very definitely looking forward to November.

Hanukkah and Christmas I mention because I adore the holiday season, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, and I’m planning to start collecting gifts as insanely early as I can tolerate this year. Holiday shopping in September? Bring it on!

And finally, New Year’s. It always makes me think of goals, of setting them, of meeting them. I started 2010 with a vague goal (have an awesome, successful year) and a more concrete goal (query BB and sign with an agent). Since I’ve done the latter (still grinning about that), which has led to the former (yes, I’d say it’s awesome), I must conclude 2010 has been pretty good to me so far. But the year is still young. More awesome can still happen in the next four months. So even if 2011 is a mere 119 days away, that’s still four months of potential win. Who says I can’t be cheekily optimistic?

What are your goals for the next month — four months? Are you planning on NaNoWriMo, or getting all your holiday presents before Halloween (and do you have a Halloween costume)? Tell me!

The unpacking has gone quickly. We’re all but settled in. Last week I didn’t sit down much. This week I’ve finally had the time to spare and I’m slowly realizing all of the things I need to catch up on doing, things I put off when we were in the midst of moving that I can’t ignore any longer. That stack of old mail… yeah…

Several things have happened in the last week to make it even crazier. First, the air conditioning unit in the living room broke. The transformer inside melted, surprising even our Super. Needless to say it’s in the 80s in New York so I wish it was working, but we’re surviving. Next — and probably the most ugh-inducing — was the death of my netbook. Yes, my 10″ Dell Inspiron Mini, purchased in April 2009, is dead. (The harddrive makes the most awful noise and it can’t find the OS. Grr. I’m pretty techy but even I can’t fix that.) The bad news? It died two weeks out of warranty. The good news? American Express may be able to help us with their extended warranty program. Sweet! But that said, I essentially haven’t had my own computer with internet in… a while. We wouldn’t have any internet at all (thanks to the ethernet wiring we still need to do) if the husband’s souped up computer didn’t have a wireless adapter as well as an ethernet port.

The last and most exciting thing this week is… I’ve caved. I’m getting a MacBook Pro. I’m converting to Apple! Ah! It’s exciting! (I was hooked in college, always preferring the Mac clusters of public computers to the PCs, though I’ve wanted to own one since the Mac computers came in bright colors. Eons ago, now…) I didn’t want to invest in one for another year or two yet, but with the death of the Mini, the husband and I felt it was time. It’s supposed to arrive today. I can feel the productivity it’ll inspire in me already. FedEx hasn’t dropped it off yet. (And no: refreshing the FedEx website will not inspire their packages to move any faster. I’ve tried. My magical powers of persuasion via Internet still need to be honed, it seems.) Once it arrives, I’ll be in geek heaven for a little while. Probably for a long while. I’m still geeking out about my iPhone 3GS and that’s almost a year old.

I’m hoping that after today, once I have a real computer again, I’ll be able to jump into work seamlessly. I’ve got a lot to catch up on and I’m very excited to get back to writing. (Thoughts of plots and dialogue have been popping up lately and I need to get them down into a document before they flutter away.) I can’t wait!

This month the husband (why am I calling him that now? Has he outgrown ‘the boy’?) read the entire draft in its new and happily rewritten form and he made a whole bunch of suggestions. (The first being, once he got up as far as it’s written, the comment, “Why isn’t it DONE yet?! GAHHHH!” Oh, a familiar sentiment from the Alpha Readers. [I shall call you that, ladies!]) He’s easily caught up on logical errors and always wants everything to be “Epic!” and so if a supposed action sequence dribbles on the page, he’ll call me on it. “I expected EPIC, Erin, EPIC!” Of course, I am not writing Epic Fantasy (let’s remember that is its own genre) and he knows that, but his sentiment is rather universal. Dribbling scenes are no fun for anyone.

In non-writing news, the holidays have been fun. We did Hanukkah (all eight nights of candles and presents!) and Christmas, and of course the husband’s birthday fell between the two so it was more or less non stop presents and such. We got him a PlayStation 3 (us, really) for the birthday, as well as a fun assortment of toys related to it (oh, BluRay!). I also made him a scrapbook, my first foray into the world of scrapbooking. (I cheated; I used a kit and a bunch of pre-made stickers. Is that cheating? I know people get intense about scrapbooks.) I thematically designed it around our “love” (cough, or relationship), starting with hilarious photos from 2004, through our backpacking venture in 2007, leading to the wedding and honeymoon. It was one of those sugary-cutesy things I’m only really inclined to do every few years, though the look on Bryan’s face was absolutely worth it. (If cutesy-artsy things didn’t take me forever to do — perfectionism! — I’d do them more often. The girlie 12 year old part of me enjoys it immensely. [My inner 12 year old is always the loudest of the inner children. My inner 8 year old wanted a Lego kit for Christmas -- either a Star Wars one or a castle/knights one -- and I think she's still upset about not getting one again.])

Hm. I keep making parenthetical observations in parentheses. Are there parenthetical commentary abusers anonymous meetings? Or messageboards?

Oh. Day after Christmas, we found FernGully at Target for $5. After seeing Avatar the weekend before Christmas (which was AMAZING!!!!), I realized I really needed to own a DVD version of that movie. (My 8 year old inner self was reasonably appeased by this purchase.) I sat and watched it that night with rapt attention. I’m not ashamed at all. I was Crysta for Halloween one year and had a three-year (minimum!) obsession with fairies. These are the things that (all added together) led me to writing fantasy in the first place. Kind of fascinates me, in a way, backtracking through my years of obsessions and how they’ve all influenced me. (Lock me up before I start self-psychoanalyzing all of that.)

The Christmas tree is still alive. (Fraser fir is the way to go, folks!) We’re going to take its lights and ornaments off after New Year’s and cart it to our local park where it will be recycled into mulch for the spring. (Yay recycling!) The day after Christmas I started pulling out all the decor boxes, to pack it all up, and the husband (this is his first Christmas tree) refused to let me. “Not yet!” Oh, Christmas is magic, isn’t it?

For the past few days I have been going painstakingly line by line over a printout of my WiP and making edits and pages of notes. There is something fundamentally different between scrolling with the click wheel down a page of text in the Word Processor versus sitting over it with a colored pen with proofreader’s marks. (For the most part I do use the formal notations but I have developed my own system after years of editing papers and stories.) It’s laboriously slow but the result has somewhat startled me. I’ve hacked and slashed a bunch of lines here and there, lines I’d skip over when scrolling because I “liked” them or because I remembered so vividly the day I wrote them. But now that they’re printed in front of me, they’ve been cut. It’s quite fun, being merciless! (Especially because I know I’ve saved a version of this, so the words will never be gone “forever”.)

I am starting to get impatient with finishing this. I feel like that’s a good sign. I keep daydreaming about scenes in it, too. Staring off into space at the gym on the elliptical, I sort of ignored my podcast and thought instead of my plot. Going through this draft like this has shown me its nitpicky errors but also its really lovely moments. I really love this story. It geeks me out, almost. It’s also the first entirely new story I’ve written since college. (The other drafts I’ve been cycling through either started in college or started before college.) This one I started this last January and it’s been purely a project of 2009. Part of me wants to bookend it thusly and just get it done before the new year. But the other part of me, the practical one, looks at my work schedule and thinks it can’t really be done. The husband even said to me yesterday, “Think of this deadline as a fictitious deadline. Because really, that’s all it is. It’s in our heads. There’s no real external pressure on you.” But that’s just it. Internal pressure is pretty darned effective too. I feel it weighing on me every day now. I’ve worked on four different drafts this year. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of brand new words in 2009. It’s time I finished this one and got on to the next. Boom, boom, done. Yes. (If I write it here, I will do it, I know it!)

November is a legendary month for writing for me and this year was no exception. I won NaNoWriMo after only 20 days of writing! My pace was extreme, my stress level was surprisingly low, and no chores around the house were completed until I hit 50,000 words. But…once I hit those 50,000 words in my lovely (and really, I love it) draft, I more or less pulled my head from my cave of words and realized I needed to prepare for Thanksgiving, read a book, watch some TV (I neglected TV for those 20 days) and clean the apartment. So I finished the month with just over 51,000 words, rather than pushing through any further than that. If not for the Thanksgiving holiday and its attendant family responsibilities, I probably would have gone a lot further… (I will maintain that position indefinitely!)

Reading Accomplishments

• Born of Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon

I picked up Born of Fire and Born of Ice, too. I’m a sucker for anything vaguely reminiscent of Star Wars and this series is that, and fun to boot. Still haven’t finished Sherlock Holmes, though I plug through the stories when I can. (Sherlock has become my read-to-work book, so I read half a story on the bus every afternoon.) … Which reminds me… First Lord’s Fury has just come out now that it’s December, hasn’t it? *Runs to bookstore*

• Vanished by Kat Richardson
• Bad Moon Rising by Sherrilyn Kenyon
• Naamah’s Kiss by Jacqueline Carey
• Big Bad Wolf by Christine Warren
• Demon’s Kiss by Maggie Shayne

I’ve also started reading a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Never read any of them until now, and I love them. Love.

Writing Accomplishments

A few thousand words in my WIP. Tons of editing and polishing work. Completely and entirely reworked whole chapters and plot points. It feels good.

I plunged back into my most recent draft with a renewed fervor. I’ve been rewriting it and it’s been going very well! The rewrite has taken it in a few slightly altered directions but it’s all for the best, I think. The world is very vivid this time around, and it’s much easier for me to dig into it. I think I needed the bit of mental break I’d taken when I worked on another document for a while. Coming back to this one now feels great.

Reading Accomplishments

• Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey
• Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost

I also listened to Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour and Kitty Goes to Washington on audiobook, prompting me to continue reading the series over again (I’m on Kitty and the Silver Bullet now).

I’ve been switching between several different drafts. I’ve started fresh rewrites of two of them, and I’m working on deepening the backstory and streamlining the history of the linked stories. It’s a lot of work but not as much actual word count progress as I’d like, but I am still proud of what I’ve been getting done.

Reading Accomplishments

• Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse #9)
• Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
• Awakened Mage by Karen Miller

I also listened to Kushiel’s Dart and Kushiel’s Chosen on audiobook.

I’m now approximately halfway through my re-write of my current draft. It’s been going slowly the last week or so because of a ton of life issues that have cropped up all of a sudden but I have hopes that things will get back on track this week.

Reading Accomplishments

Firstly, I’ve gotten Bryan to read a lot of books this month via audiobook and even via regular book. Our honeymoon cruise mid-month helped with that, I think. Otherwise my main reading accomplishment were the first three several-hundred-page epic volumes of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series, which were excellent and highly recommended:

• Kushiel’s Dart
• Kushiel’s Chosen
• Kushiel’s Avatar

Plus I listened to a few books I’ve already read on audiobook:

• Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon
• Night Pleasures by Sherrilyn Kenyon

June will be a good month. I’m looking forward to True Blood‘s return to HBO and the start of my part-time job as well as the lovely calm that will now (hopefully) descend as a result of our endless wedding celebrations finally being over.

Writing Accomplishments

Lots of editing & some new writing! I’ve started rewriting the book’s backstory and outline, bigtime, changing the motivations/history aspects of the plot, though the main story idea is still the same (but now with deeper and more logical connections between the characters and the backstory/present action)! Woohoo!

Yes! I am back on track!

Reading Accomplishments

• Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
• Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews
• Curse the Dawn by Karen Chance
• Living with the Dead by Kelley Armstrong

I listened to the audiobooks of two books I’ve read before: Magic Bites & Magic Burns, by Ilona Andrews, as well as the audiobook of Rhapsody by Elizabeth Haydon, which I’ve read a few times.

I’m also about halfway through Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey.