Old People Writing for Teens, IV

At home, I tend to be really distracted. There are books and DVDs and the internet to play with. Or maybe I should do laundry or cook or spend some time with the cats. When I'm at my fave cafe, I am there to work, and it puts me in the right mindset. Some other cafes can do that too, but I get antsy after a while.

Unfortunately, my fave cafe is 45 minutes away from home, so it's a commitment to go. I ended up not going today because there's also a point in the morning where going doesn't make much sense anymore. I'm working from a Panera today, with the intention to really work, though. I have out aPB and a notebook, where I plan to rewrite it. Of course, opening it is important...

In other news, I'm really wondering if I made a mistake taking time off to revise TM. My request ratio was amazing in August, and now it's awful.

Specialfae said:

I'm still patiently (not really) waiting to hear back on the open submission I entered. Does anyone else have a hard time writing when they wait or submit? I'm still relatively new to the actual 'trying to get published' part and that part seems to constrict me mentally.

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For me it depends. Right now I'm pretty chill for responses, and I was really surprised when R&RAgent got back to me so soon, even though if I had been thinking about it, it was exactly the amount of time I would have expected based on QT and past experience. But when I'm tracking that stuff (I suggest not tracking that stuff, btw, lol), I can go super crazy if an agent/editor takes much longer than Query Tracker or AW says she should.

Right now there is only one query that I feel should have been answered by now based on other people's experiences. And I don't have any materials out, atm, so that helps me be more chill (in some ways. In others, I'm like, "Why no requests in February, when you all loved the query in August?")

Give it a shot. What can it hurt?

So, whether I make huge sweeping changes or not, I'm going to rewrite aPB in a notebook, with different colored pens for Blake and Lawrence, and then transfer the whole thing to the computer later. This forces me to rewrite the thing twice, so if I'm changing Ren's voice, I have two shots of writing it down before I have a new copy on my computer. This is pretty much what I did to focus on Austin's voice in TM, and it worked really well. Of course, he had like a tenth of the novel, and here I'm doing the whole thing, so we'll see how enthusiastic I am a fourth of the way through it

I feel really good about this decision though, because I feel like it gives me the freedom to add some stuff I might not if I were just using what was already written down. Also, this seems to automatically tighten what I've written, because when I write it again, I always see ways that I can see how to be tighter, even more easily than when I'm crossing stuff out on a printed version.