No, I am not referring to the looming end of the Mayan calendar on December 21st. I am talking about the day that the winners of the writing contest are announced, you know, the one that I have been blabbing on and on about for the past month. I am sure those that follow this blog are glad to see it is finally over.

I thought long and hard about if I should post this before or after the winners were announced. I finally decided since I had already started this blog post with a promise to not mention said writing contest again that I guess I need to have the results to keep that promise.

So what happened? Am I about to victoriously do a virtual tap dance across your computer screen or do I need to end this post right now so I can wallow in my self pity and defeat?

Well…

It turns out that the contest was so overwhelmed with entries that they haven’t been able to review them all yet and probably will not announce a winner until sometime in January. WHAT?????????? Oh, the wait has been agony and now I have to wait even longer for an unknown period of time?? Absolutely killing me!

There is only one thing I can do in a situation like this…Keep writing. I had high hopes for winning but, with so many entries, who knows if my story will be one of the ones that gets selected. I cannot harp about it anymore as it just distracts me from what the main goal in all of this is anyways. And that is to get The Beholder finished. I need to stop waiting for contest results, stop snooping around on agents’ websites, stop looking for a book cover designer and just WRITE. The whole goal is just to complete The Beholder!

For some reason, I had this stupid idea in my head that I would glide along easily to 60,000-80,000 words by sometime in January and then edit it for a few weeks and be well on my way to submitting it to agents by the summer. Now, not that this is an unlikely timeline but I think I have been too lax if this is really my goal. I just read a fellow aspiring writer’s blog in to which she is on the 5th draft. Five draft versions?? Wait, it is going to take me more than one??

I do not know why this surprises me this much. I feel like I knew this subconsciously but my mind was trying to block it so as not to discourage me in knowing that I am so very far away from The Beholder being completed. However, I do think the word count goals have been helping me move along. Even though I usually never reach the goal I set for myself, I have gotten pretty close and it helps me to have some small chunk to work towards.

In reality, I would really like to have a first draft completed by March 1st. I can only really guess this milestone from my past experience with how fast I am able to move the story along with the time I have to devote to this novel. I really can’t set any other specific milestones since I have no idea how many draft versions I will go through or how long they take. It is probably based on what kind of beta readers I am able to get and what their general comments on it that make the revisions happen. I will just give myself three months approximately for that process so – June 1st. Final editing and then writing the dreaded query letters and researching agents: by August 1st. I think the researching agents part will actually be fun. I can just imagine myself reading the bio of the perfect one and thinking “Oh, my agent soul mate, I have found you!” After that, it is just a waiting game that I can put no time stamp on whatsoever. So…I guess submitting it by this summer is still doable.

I think tonight needs to be devoted to my writing madness. I have been reaching for that 20,000 word mark for far too long!

But anyways, I cannot promise now that I will not mention the contest again, especially if I win …but at least I won’t be harping about it (too much) anymore. Did you ever get caught up in something that was writing related but really not that important when it comes to just getting your story down?