I woke up at 6:30am, took a shower, and got dressed. I made my wife an omelette, walked the dog, and hopped in my car. I took a 7:48am train into NYC. I live on Long Island so this is about an hour trip on the weekend (slightly faster when I get on an express train on a weekday). I had a nice donut and some espresso at Birch. I got to my Kung Fu school around 9:30am and everything after that is a blur. I got back home at 6pm.
I use Ulysses app for Mac OS X for all of my writing. When you write in Ulysses you're working with plain text and you perform basic formatting with markdown syntax. What I love about Ulysses is how simple it is. Yet the application's simplicity does not mean it's trivial. In fact, it's extremely powerful. I am writing this post to talk about how I use it to write.
With my third draft nearly complete, I'm beginning the process of putting together 10-15 literary agents to query. In the past I wondered if this process was going to be stressful. Now that I'm almost here, it doesn't seem stressful at all. It seems exciting.
That said, I haven't actually submitted a query yet. My best guess is that my heart rate will spike a bit in the moments before I send out those e-mails.
I ask myself if that's really a bad thing? I don't think so. Life is richer with a little risk and excitement. I am glad to be writing.
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When I finished the first draft of my novel back in January I was pretty happy with myself. Little did I realize that I had a boatload of work ahead of me, and a lot more work than writing the first draft. O was a bit naive about the whole novel writing endeavor since this is my first time through. I guess that's understandable. Now I'm focusing on finishing my second draft and I'm going to use NaNoWriMo to do it. I mean, it worked last time.
So, I'm inventing a new way to count words, wherein when I'm done with my second draft, the word count will be 50k. When I am half done, I'll be at 25k. Simple.
Go and check out my progress here: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/nickcody/novels/the-harvester-rewrite
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I'm in the middle of editing Act I and I'm finding to be a lot of work. I mean, I guess it's not really harder than I thought it would be, I always knew it would be a lot of work, but now it's real and I'm in the middle of it.