To do list. And a Lolcat so things don't get too serious.

I just wrote a few thousand words of The Harmings so I thought I'd reward myself with a Lolcat, hehe. Here he is!


Bad, impatient kitty. Now, down to business...

The following is a list of things that have to be done before I send Lharmell off to agents.

The current draft needs some tweaking. After plenty of voddies at Sentido funf, or whatever the silly place is called (the bar is fun, but what a name! Worse than Cas Retops around the corner. And how much are Smith and Gertrude streets the new Brunswick Street? You can't walk on the pavement for all the drunk people!) I extracted some good criticisms from Mike. I also have Stephen and Tam's marked up manuscripts to look over. Fingers crossed that Clare, my YA teacher, will hand me back my MS tomorrow too.

Tam also said she had some ideas for my synopsis of Lharmell, too, to stop it being so "and then and then and then". I can't decide which is harder to write, the opening of the book or the damned synopsis!! It's certainly a close one.

I have scrappy outlines of The Harmings and Queen of Lharmell (books two and three) but they certainly wouldn't be fit to grace an agents desktop. They'll need to be fleshed out and polished before any letters are sent, in case of request.

As much of The Harmings should be completed and polished too. It's going to be difficult to prove to agents and editors that an unpublished author has the skill and motivation to finish a trilogy, so having as much done as possible will work in my favour.

Then there's the letters to the agents themselves. Nathan Bransford's blog has lots of great tips, and Kristen Nelson's. I have a rough draft of a query letter down somewhere but this will have to be polished too. I tells ya, sometimes I feel like a maid, not a writer with all this polishing going on!

That's it for now. Coffee time. Wordcount: 17,508. When I hit 20,000 I'm going to print it off and deluge it with red pen.