Happy New Year 2009!

Wishing each and every one a healthy and happy New Year filled with prosperity and great books to read!

New Writing Projects

I've been moping around since NaNoWriMo ended on November 30. This year's WriMo was, as always, both exhilarating and brutal, and I miss it. Yes, it's nice to be able to read again ~ in fact, I've already finished Fool, a truly bawdy but really entertaining new novel by Christopher Moore based on Shakespeare's King Lear (review coming soon to Just One More Page) and am halfway through Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais, one of my favorite mystery writers, and Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, an anthology of "hair-raising holiday tales," featuring Sookie Stackhouse in a really lovely short story about what starts out as a really lonely Christmas. And, compliments of Hachette Books, I just received a copy of Gods Behaving Badly, a debut by Marie Phillips, which I can't wait to start. (Actually, I've read the first chapter and already it's made me laugh out loud.) You can read more about Gods Behaving Badly and enter a giveaway contest on my blog at Just One More Page.

Anyway besides being able to read again, it's also nice to be able to socialize and relax and blog. But, still, I miss the frenzied madness that is NaNo.

So, to try and end my general mopiness, I have joined a critique group. We're going to meet once a week and critique portions of each other's writing. It's a little scary to think of sharing my fiction writing with others, but they are fellow WriMos, so I think I can trust them to be kind, though I hope they are also honest. Just not brutally so.

I have also signed up for Forward Motion's writing course, which takes two (yikes! two!) years to get through but which could result in a submittable (is that a word?) novel.

Maybe, between the two projects, I will actually manage to finish writing a novel or two. How amusing that would be!