Today is the first day of my summer vacation.  FINALLY!!!!
I have a few goals for this summer I’d like to share.
1.      Finish the first draft of my WIP, GRUNSDAY.  I’m not sure how long this is going to take and especially not sure how I’m going to pull off the climax I have in mind.  I may have to adjust my expectations, but I’ll figure it out as I go.  That’s the joy of being a pantster. The next chapter is often a surprise.  The other part of being a pantster is ending every first draft with a laundry list of changes needed to clean up the mistakes I made along the way.  So, I usually roll from draft one directly into draft two. I don’t expect to get that done this summer, but I hope I’ll be looking for beta readers for draft two sometime in the fall.
2.      Take a mine tour in the Pocono Mountains.  I have an incomplete draft of a historical fiction story in which an archeologist’s daughter makes surprising discoveries in a Pennsylvania mine in the early 1900’s.  I started the draft too late in the fall to take a tour of an actual mine, and I want to remedy that this summer.
3.      Determine the fate of PORTAL. Lack of the mine tour was not the only problem I had with the manuscript mentioned above, which I laid aside after getting 55k words into it.  One of the things I need to do this summer is review the draft, figure out where I went wrong, and determine whether it needs revisions, a complete re-write, or to be trunked entirely.
Sorcia (right) and friend, Houston
4.      Get some exercise. I can’t sit in front of the laptop all day.  Well, I can, but I shouldn’t.  I’ve got the pool, and I’ve got the dog – who loves to walk in the White Clay Creek Preserve.  So I need to get off my butt and get moving.
5.      Refuse to ride the emotional roller coaster.  This goal may be the most important one of all.  Last summer, I was on submission, and I took every rejection hard.  In fact, it was worse being off for the summer while it was happening, because I didn’t have a full teaching day and 60 students to distract me.  There was plenty of time to wallow in misery.  But by the end of the summer, THE CAGED GRAVES sold to Clarion, acquired by the perfect editor for it.  In retrospect, all that angst was a horrible waste of my mind, my heart, and my summer.  This time, I hope to handle all publishing related news – good or bad – with more equanimity.
What are your goals for the summer?