Well here we are halfway through April and I haven’t updated or revised my goals. Taking a vacation last week was both good and bad. Bad in the sense that it distracted me and got me off track. Good in the sense that it refreshed me and slowly the relaxing effects are starting to catch up and I am finding new inspiration.

While on vacation I was able to keep up with my devotion schedule and posted everyday until Saturday, when low and behold, we were back from vacation and I needed a vacation from my vacation. (A nice way of saying I needed to get my butt back in gear.) Not an easy task when as soon as I get started I get a migraine. This one was a bad one, although not painful, it made me foggy and unfocused. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, let alone trying to write. It took until Wednesday before I was able to write a blog post.

Fortunately, I discovered a new country this week. It’s a place most writers know, but don’t try to spend too much time there because it is very frustrating. It is somewhere between edit/revision land and writing land. For me it is a place where I have done all the final edits I can until the copy editor sends the next batch through, a place where the first revision of my current wip is done and now waiting on input from the critique group, and a place where I am not quite ready to start on the next project. All that combined with a little angst in the rest of my life and you get frustrating.

So I’ll fill you in on the updates and hopefully that will stir the juices to jump into writing land while I wait on other things.

Palace of Twelve Pillars: I have up to Chapter 9 edited. Now I wait on more chapters from the copy editor to continue the process. My updated plan called for me to start querying by mid-May. But a few things happened this past week to change those plans. I am going to a conference in August (funny thing is it’s right before another vacation.) Anyway I requested a meeting with an agent where my plan now is to pitch this to her. Depending on how that works out then I may or may not start querying other agents and publishers. My original plan had me paying someone to do all the legwork, but now I am rethinking that.  We’ll see what happens.

Palace of Three Crosses: I finished the first round of revisions and now it is going through my critique group. Still on target for finishing that up by the end of October.

Palace of Nine Dragons: Some beginning writing done, but something was preventing me from making a real start. I think mentally I had to have enough done in edit/revision land done before the characters would let me move on. A second thing that was holding me back was the title of the book. I have never really struggled with titles until this one, which in turn spurred some controversy in Three Crosses land, but that is a story for another day. Anyway I had brainstormed with my writing group and came up with Nine Dragons. Silly me thought that since the other two were Palace of whatever  that this one had to be Palace of Nine Dragons. But then one night just as I was falling asleep, two things occured to me, first it didn’t have to be Palace of Whatever and second although Nine Dragons was right I needed a different structure. Each of the Palaces played a major role in their respective novels, and this one would too. But I didn’t really need another Palace, instead I needed a place of refuge, of rest, a spiritual place for the dragons as well as the other creatures inhabiting the book. Temple was my first thought, but that is too denominational specific, I think Cathedral and Basilica are to formal, high religion things, and chapel or church don’t quite indicate the importance of this place. Then last week while I was on that vacation I mentioned, we stopped in a place called The Grotto. It was a shrine to the Mary the Sorrowful Mother. Anyway this place was everything that I wanted in this final book, a place for the characters to find peace and solace and protection in a world filled with evil. A natural place with caves and trees, flowers and waterfalls. A place where man, Kningrad and Asha worked together to create a resting place on the planet which they inhabit.

So I’m still not sure what to call it, right now Grotto or Shrine are vying for position, but I have started to introduce the place in Three Crosses and it will become central to the third and final (Maybe) novel in the Twelve Pillars series.

Now I can really start to write and get out of this in between land with no name.

And I’ve got writers group this afternoon. What better place to get the ball rolling.

Happy Writing and God Bless,

Christina Weigand