Progress Update

So I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of hours this week at Panera, I’m about halfway through reading my first draft, and, you know, progress is being made.

Yay! Progress!

I’ve made an online writing buddy, and we’re both pretty much at the same stage with our writing, so we’ve been going back and forth talking about our manuscripts and our worries/troubles/etc.

And I’m working on trying to learn the whole social media thing, because I went to a literary agents panel at the Festival of Books and they said that if you can start building an audience, it looks good when you’re querying.

SO THANKS, GUYS. Because all like, ten of you who have subscribed to my blog? You’re helping me build an audience I could maybe put into a query letter to an agent saying, “Look, see? People read my stuff. I’m not invisible!” Not that I’m doing this blog for readers – I don’t want to fool myself into thinking what I have to say is interesting. I think what I’m trying to say is, thanks for the support you’ve shown me so far. I hope I can do the same for some of you, too.

Festival of Books

Went to the Festival of Books this weekend in Los Angeles.

Guys, it was so exciting!

For any of you that are writing, I recommend going to an event like this. It was so interesting getting to hear from different people in the literary world, from authors to editors to agents. I carried my notebook everywhere I went and made tons of unreadable notes.

I also loved hearing questions from the audience, especially at the YA panels. It makes me so happy to see youth and teens ask questions to authors – to see them getting excited about reading and writing, especially the teens. Being a teenager is hard. It’s hard to be excited about things sometimes, to ask questions, or to attempt to pursue the things you really care about (although that can be hard for any age, really!). But it made me happy to see teens passionate about writing, excited about books, cheering for the authors they read and loved.

Yay! Reading is alive and well!

Anyways, I just got back tonight and I’m still pumped up. And it was FREE, on top of that! I hope all of you can get to an event like this at some point, because I just think it was really fun and interesting and informative. And it makes me feel all happy and excited to be around other people who also love books and writing. I wanted to be friends with everyone I saw writing in their journals and reading books on the grass, haha.

One big thing I want to focus on after this weekend is improving my social networking. So I’m going to start trying to update this blog more (because then all the readers will just start POURING in, right? Yeahhh), and learning the whole twitter shebang.

 

Also, I’ve let my first draft simmer for about a month now, and I think this week I have to approach the second draft. Excited, but nervous. I know I have a lot of work ahead of me.

 

I hope writing has been going well for the rest of you out there as well!