Setting goals and making rules

Happy Tuesday, bloggerbuddies! Today's been a thick and humid day in London, which was awful in the tube - cramped and sweaty and ugh - but otherwise quite lovely. We're in a wee bit of a heatwave, woop. I hope it sticks around and we get an actual summer this year.

This Friday I'm heading off to Munich for a long weekend, which I'm super excited for. I haven't been to Germany yet! And it'll be my first trip since Canary Islands at Christmas. Duuude. I'm jonesing for some travel.

Urm, what else. Lately I've been working on creating my own website - quite exciting, no? I'm muddling my amateur way through Wordpress and will be mashing up something hopefully halfway decent. When it's ready I'm gonna import the archives from this blog into it, and then continue on updating over there. So I don't know what might happen to thejamtart! I wonder if I can redirect it to my new site instead!

And I've been creeping along on In Finding, word by word. Phew. I've been pondering setting myself a goal around finishing the first draft. Because I've always wanted to finish the first draft this year - but, holy shit guys, it's JULY in two days and I'm only at 65,000 words! So maybe if I have a goal (say, finish the first draft by my birthday in October) then erm that might motivate me more? I could break it down to chunks of words per month.

However, part of me thinks that setting a goal like that may see me writing crap words just to meet the wordcount...!

I've had a new(ish) story idea stirring around in my mind for the last few weeks, to the point where I'd like to start jotting down some notes about it. But I'm committed to finishing In Finding first (Seriously! I am! Don't look like that, I am going to finish this story, for real!). So how about a writer rule: I can't type out anything about the new story until I've finished In Finding - but I can put down ideas in a notebook.

And here are a couple of interesting snippets about writing that I came across recently:

Making a monster: Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, talks about creating a wicked woman, the debacle of film school, and becoming an overnight success after 20 years. I'm always heartened when I hear about writers taking 20 years to get published...!!

Erin Kellison, recently published author of Shadow Bound, talks about her writing path to getting published. I especially love the way it starts: "I had zero aspirations for the manuscript to be published. Zero. My goal was this: learn to write a book while having fun."