Unfinished

My List of Unfinished Items is…unfinished. Every week I start out thinking “I’m going to get my blog done early this time,” and yet every week, I scramble on the 11^th hour…or the next day. So, in one sense, I’m perfectly on time with my tardiness.

As I struggled to identify what unfinished projects I had lying about, I realized the elephant in my office: my novel. Technically, I finished writing my vigilante novel in December 2020 and started querying literary agents to represent me in the hopes of getting my manuscript published. I’ve been sending queries in batches of 3-6 every couple of months. To date, I have sent out 17 queries and received 4 rejections. The remaining 13 agents didn’t respond, but I think enough time has passed that we can safely assume it wasn’t what they were looking for. Anywho. I haven’t queried an agent in 3 months, so the holdup for this particular project is…me.

As it turns out, I have a second elephant in my office, which is the sequel to my first novel. I started working on what I lovingly refer to as “Book 2” in January 2021. The year started out with decent progress, but I honestly haven’t written much since April and my word count is a mere 8,243. Mind you, the majority of fiction novels for this genre is around 80,000 to 90,000 words, so I’ve barely dented the iceberg. It would appear I have trouble focusing…hence the name of my blog “Quirky SQUIRREL.”

…(a short pause)

I literally just wrote a “To Finish” list, so that’s one thing I can cross off of my mental list as completed. The first thing I wrote on my list is “mend holes in jeans.” I happen to have two pairs of jeans and two pairs of jean shorts with material that has become awfully worn between the thighs (okay, one of them is only worn, and the other three actually have visible holes in the material…most likely due to a lack of thigh gap). Since, (1) I don’t want to spend money on new clothes, and (2) the clothes are still wear-able, I need to iron on a patch or learn how to sew a hole in the fabric without making the material bunch awkwardly. The second thing on my list is to query a(nother) literary agent and continue to query at least one agent a week until I find one that is interested in my book. Number three is a small goal, yet also continuous: write 100 words on Book 2. I really need to work on this one daily. The final item on my list so far … remember what I’m forgetting. Now that could take a while. The last novel I wrote took 7 years to write. I hope this next one comes to me a bit faster. Meanwhile, I’m off to work on my elephants.