I have a working draft of The Unseeing in my file folder. It’s been sent off to a few readers now to see how the greater populace takes it. I did two rounds of revisions before I shared it out, and cut about 7,000 words from the original draft. I think it’s in decent shape, but I also thought my third draft of The Unraveling was in decent shape and ended up doing a major overhaul in the fifth and sixth.

One thing I really wish I could find is a real crit group of other writers I could trade feedback for. I’m sure in my city of more than a million people there must be a few, but I have no idea how to find one. Then there’s the fact that I’d be coming into the group with two completed novels for critiquing. And the fact that I’d prefer a slow, torturous death to sitting in front of strangers and reading my rough work aloud. Is there an online-only crit group out there somewhere?

Seriously, is there?

While I’m waiting for the feedback from my beta readers to trickle in, it’s back to the grind of querying for me. I got some helpful notes with one rejection that I want to apply, so that’s my focus for the next couple weeks. Then I plan on spending a good amount of time outlining the next book. My tentative plan is to start writing it for NaNo 2013 in November, but I’ll need a solid outline if I’m going to hit 50K without losing my mind like I did the last time I attempted it. My outlines are no small feat – the last one was 6,000 words of point-form notes.

It’s nice to have the next couple months planned out, although the workload seems like it’s a bit light without major editing or new content to write. Might be a good time to start developing some of the other story ideas I have kicking around in my head… this song keeps coming up on iTunes and sparking scenes and ideas. I’m listening, universe…