Friday, January 8, 2010

Down to Business

I’m back to this blog after a few weeks away enjoying holiday festivities (and snow in Minnesota). Like the other gals on this blog I’ve come up with goals that I want to achieve in 2010 and I have some great writing events on the horizion:

Goals:

- Get a headshot taken and a website up and running. It’s been pounded into my head at just about every meeting/workshop that I’ve attended that even those of us who are “pre-published” need to market ourselves. Agents and editors commonly google the names of those who have submitted to them and if it looks like you’ve taken an active role in marketing yourself they know they can count on you to take a role in marking your work. I’ve asked one person in my RWA chapter who has an amazing headshot on her website for info on who did it and I’ve been checking into other local photographers. Samantha has agreed to help me in wordpress come up with a website. This is going to be a big challenge for me as programming of any kind can be frustrating for me.

- Find an agent – while I do still plan on submitting to Harlequin on my own, I think that finding an agent to represent me and my work will make future submissions easier.


- As previously mentioned I want to submit my historical western novella to Harlequin’s Historical Undone line. Much to my pleasant surprise, a fellow Hearts Through History RWA member is having the first western in that line come out in February!

- Develop other projects including a YA western idea I’ve had. – most especially since that’s the Cherry Adiar Write the Damn Book Challenge book for this year.

- Speaking of the WTDB challenge, this year Cherry is having us all report in weekly, on Sundays, with a goal of pages for the week and reporting how many pages were written and/or revised the week before.

Events:

- Saturday, January 16th – Just Write on Whidbey Island, WA – this is an event being put on by a local literary agent, Andrea Hurst. For the entire day you go and just write and get feedback and support (and maybe an offer of representation?) from her. Samantha and I are both attending. More information on Ms. Hurst and this day of writing can be found at: http://www.andreahurst.com/?page_id=13

- Saturday, February 6th – workshop by Mary Buckham to the members of the Greater Seattle RWA chapter. Usually this woman’s workshops run in the hundreds of dollars to attend. She is nationally renowned by writers of all kinds for her workshops (find her and her book, Break Into Fiction (which you should own!) here http://www.marybuckham.com/index.html). The workshop she’s giving us is called “From Thought to Plot” – note this workshop is for GSRWA members only.

- There are also several workshops being given online through various RWA chapters – some chapters do require you to be an RWA member to take their courses, others don’t. One that’s recently caught my attention is The Art of Re-Writing: http://www.romance-ffp.com/event.cfm?EventID=127. It’s not clear if you need to be an RWA member to attend the course – the registration page asks for an RWA number but lists that field as optional so you probably don’t.

I’m also going to be contacting several local authors that have new releases coming out to see if they’d like to blog here about what they wish they knew starting out. Here’s to a very fulfilling and productive year for all of us in 2010!

1 comments:

Andrea said...

Those are great goals, Colleen. I'm excited to follow your progress!