With Ulterior Motive at a friend's who is an editing whiz (she should do this professionally!) and the Gingerbread Man currently being reviewed and critiqued by friends/fellow writing colleagues, the question is, which manuscript should I tackle next?

It could take a few months before Ulterior Motive is back to me to rewrite, and same with the Gingerbread Man so querying them might actually not be feasible until beginning of 2012. Perhaps that's not a bad thing. With so many literary agent pow...
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So, I'm giving some manuscripts--those I'm planning on selling hard next year--one final read through and spit-shine polish before I start crafting my queries. I read somewhere that as some part of a New Years resolution, agents get slammed with queries at the beginning of the year and during the holiday season. It's often contributed to that age-old ritual of "this will be the year" mentality and just having enough time to breathe during Christmas vacation to send of a query like a shot in t...
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What a feeling of accomplishment! Since I'm out of state on business for The Job, there is a lot of down time--down time I took full advantage of. Twelve hours of uninterrupted focus, Ulterior Motive is has been refined into a final draft. One more reread, reviews by friends, and it'll be the first I query in 2011.

I was able to focus with lots of coffee and good music (thank you Pandora!).

Because word count was such an issue, I was able to shave UM from 114K to 108K. You might think, holy cr...
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