Fess Up Friday

Well it’s Friday, thank God.  Not that it’s been a bad week by any means.  It’s actually gone by pretty quickly and very well.  I set a minimal goal of 2000 words this week, with the stipulation that I write something every day.  Starting with Act 2 instead of at the very beginning, so far I’ve done that.

• Monday: 200ish words
• Tuesday: 100ish words (was on the road all day for work and away from computers)
• Wednesday: 300ish words
• Thursday: 518 words

So yeah, okay, I’ve only got 1200 words in 4 days for an average of 300 words, but I’ve only got 800 words left to write to meet my goal, and right now I need the boost of success.  AND with the exception of Tuesday, the total number of words per day increased every day.  So that’s positive.  The daily goal I’m going to be setting for myself is 500 words a day, for a minimum total of 3500 words a week.  If I exceed that, fabulous.  It’s gravy.  But 500 words a day is managable with my crazy schedule and multiple demands on my time.  I don’t want to set goals of 1k a day for myself only to get repeatedly disappointed when I don’t meet them.  It’s important that I remind myself that when I was writing that much a day, I was only working two part time jobs, and after that 1 full time and 1 part time job.  Yes, that’s right self, I am cutting you some slack and admitting that–GASP–you are not Superwoman. 

Wow, what a load off!  Because really, you know, I don’t look all that great in Spandex.  And blue just isn’t my color.

In other news, while I’m making confessions, I am super deep into Sexy Next Book Territory.  Yeah, yeah, I said I was going to try to break that habit.  But sometimes you just have to go with something.  The restriction is that I have to get my words for the day in on HiS.  Doing some work on Sexy Next Book (which is more like Sexy Next Series) is my reward for meeting that daily goal.

See, here’s the deal.  For the last year or so, I’ve been kicking around the idea for a heroine, a sassy, klutzy, food-loving Mississippi girl around whom I could set a series of cozy style mysteries.  I had in mind that they’d be culinary mysteries and that I would ultimately have weekly “episodes” of the story on my cooking blog, Pots and Plots.  I even had a sort of general, small cast of characters.  But the ideas for the actual plots hadn’t come to me yet, which wasn’t a big deal.  I figured it would just be something to have on the backburner and sort of slowly add notes to the concept until I had something.  It wasn’t pressing because I am still in the serious infancy stage in terms of building a readership at Pots and Plots.

But I got the exciting new this week that I was chosen to be one of the Featured Publishers at FoodBuzz, which is a fantastic foodie community for those of you who aren’t familiar with it.  It was the ideal way to begin really building readership and starting to grow Pots and Plots into what I ultimately want it to be.  Still, the idea for what I wanted to do with my series was a long way off.  Something to maybe work on next year after I’ve really established myself in the foodie community.

And then yesterday, it hit me.

My heroine, Lorelei MacIllhenney, is a hereditary witch.  In the buckle of the Bible Belt.  She’s a kitchen witch, like her grandmother.  She just doesn’t know it yet.

Since my brain seems to have firmly left the traditional mystery/suspense track for the paranormal (for now anyway), this was exactly the thing I needed.  As soon as that particular detail slid into place, my brain started firing ideas like crazy.  The possibilities are all kinds of zany and I am so excited about the prospect.  Me being me, I started a new wiki for it, so that I could begin organizing my ideas.  Pot had a brilliant idea for the name of the series: Edible Enchantments.

So…yeah.  I’m really excited about sexy next book, and I’m trying to use work on that as a reward for doing my daily words on HiS.  Either way, I feel like I’m working my way back to a rhythm and routine.

Thank you, Lord!