I'm done!

This week I finished my rewrite of To Kill the Goddess. It's a pretty amazing achievement, but I don't plan on talking about that much in this post. The Scribblerati will be critiquing my last three chapters on Monday and I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched, if you know what I mean!

So what am I going to talk about? Doing nothing. Yes, you heard it here, I plan rewarding myself on taking the next couple of weeks and doing absolutely nothing - related to the book at any rate. Now, I'll probably be thinking about book 2 nonstop and I might even jot down a few things here and there, but the focus of my next few weeks is going to be not writing.

I need some time to do nothing.

#1 Do Nothing Activity: spend more time with the lovely @mplstravelkitty

Sometimes I think I would see more of my lovely wife if we had two dogs to walk and three kids to ferry back and forth to hockey, gymnastics, and baseball. The lovely @mplstravelkitty has been amazing through this long journey and I'm looking forward to a little do nothing time with the love of my life.

#2 Do Nothing Activity: READ!

Everyone else in the Scribblerati seems to be able to write and read just fine, but I can't do it. I'm not exactly a slow reader, but I’m far from the fastest. On a normal day, by the time I've been to work, made dinner, and spent a few minutes with the lovely @mplstravelkitty I'm usually left with an hour or two to write and even less time for any reading. I just can't get into a novel if I only have 10 or 15 min. at a stretch to read. Comics are another story, and I've definitely found refuge there, but holy frakking cow do I want to read a book! I have three on tap and I plan on doing a little book review blogging with them as I finish. Stay tuned!

#3 Do Nothing Activity: Purge!

This particular activity is already in full swing. If any of you have seen my man cave you know it's wall-to-wall books, comics, and God knows only what else. Two weeks ago we pulled it all out (that took a week just by itself), had new carpet installed, and painted. At first, when the lovely @mplstravelkitty tentatively mentioned the idea, I was dead set against it. The mere thought of moving all that crap out of my room and then back in was, quite simply, terrifying. But then, one night when I was in there finishing up To Kill the Goddess I looked around at all the crap and I thought: purge! So that's what I'm doing, and there is a really amazing symmetry with this purge coinciding with the completion of my rewrite. I feel like I'm stepping off the plank into new, uncharted waters.

And speaking of uncharted waters….

#4 Do Nothing Activity: catch up on the RSS feeds and figure out what in the heck is going on with the publishing industry.

Has anyone else been paying attention out there? There is some crazy stuff going down. I plan on blogging more about this later, but it appears as if the publishing industry may be falling into that tailspin I've been yammering on about for a while. The landscape could look a lot different in several months to a year from now and while nobody knows anything for certain, I feel absolutely confident in saying there are some choppy waters ahead. The million-dollar question is once the storm is over will the industry see land or will it get sucked down into a spiraling maelstrom of corporate death?

#5 Do Nothing Activity: Blog!

Expect to see more of these in the next couple of weeks.

Until then, I have a book to read.