Already? I don't know why I'm so surprised every year about this time. Summer is almost over-- although we've got another month or two of weather I would have called summer living in England. I'm on the downward slope to my next birthday. I think about all the things I said I was going to do this year, and try to work out if I can get them done in the next four months.

First and foremost, I had hoped to have an agent by this point. I finished draft one back in December last year, which seems like a lifetime ago. I re-drafted it, and gave it to someone who had offered to give me an outside perspective, a rough edit, before polishing it myself and submitting. She had it for a month. That month has now been five, I've given up hope of her coming through, and someone else has it instead.

Not that I've entirely wasted my time. As of tonight I'm thirty-two thousand words into book two. Starting book two before I'm done with book one is a definite help. It's drawing attention to things I left out, or need to mention in book one. When I get book one back I'm going to have to sit down and plot out on my whiteboard the exact timeline, because if even I am having trouble keeping up with the ages of the characters, what's a reader going to think?

My whiteboard. I have a 3' by 4' whiteboard hanging on my bedroom wall next to my bed, and every day it hangs there, silent and accusatory, reminding me of future book/play/screenplay ideas. I've jotted down a couple of almost-remembered dreams just in case. The problem is that I do a lot of my writing in down time at work. I know the music and the show so well by now, that it almost serves as a quiet place that I can shut myself off from the world. But it's not practical to take the whiteboard to work every day.

Anyway, back to the goals for the year. Agent, nope, but book two started? Hells, I'm almost half-way through. I've started work on a bunch of other projects, some literary, some theatrical. I built a set for the show BNTA's opening in less than a week. I came up with a new five year plan. So while I suppose I only had one goal for the year, I haven't achieved it and in the time left I'm not sure whether I can achieve it, there's all these other things that I've managed to do without even having them as goals.

I hate the idea of a bucket list. When I think bucket I think of the galvanized ones my grandfather used to have in his garden. Though there's nothing wrong with them per se, they had a tendency to sit there, year after year, collecting rainwater and mosquito larvae. They never moved. No one cared about the water they had in them, except maybe the mosquitoes. And the list part of that? Making lists is useless for me. If I write out a shopping list, I'll inevitably leave it at home and forget half the crap on it. And if I remember the list, how do I add to it in the store when I don't have a pen? A list is too finite. I've just got things I'm going to do at some point.

Like get an agent, as soon as book one's in the state it needs to be.

I was intending to put me book down for a couple of weeks, step back from it, take a break, before I started the edit. But yesterday I just... I just felt like doing it. I'm learning to actually listen to myself when I feel like doing something, so I picked up a pencil and started to read my own words. My gods does it need work. The prose is quite. . .to be polite to myself, quite clunky. It's the sort of book I'd discard as aeroplane reading- good enough to read in transit, but if you leave it in the seat pocket in front of you that's no great loss. This is going to take more than one edit. one thing I do seem to be getting the hang of, though, is cutting parts. I've always been told that as a writer you can get enamoured of sentences, dialogue, etc., and not want to cut them. I haven't found that to be the case yet. Two chapters in, and I'm doing battlefield surgery with my pencil.

Now, in m defense, and because I have to say something to convince myself it's not all bad, I think my writing progressed as I wrote. The first couple of chapters I was feeling my way, but it seemed to come much easier the further I got into the story. I haven't read the whole thing yet, so maybe I should read it all first and then make the changes, but the ending is so fresh (most of it was done last week, altho the last chapter was done in September) I don't feel like I need to read it just yet.

Either way, I suppose it's a good way to start the New Year. I was certainly happy, and I don't think I'm alone in this, to see the end of last year. 2009 was a. . .bizarre. . .year. So many ups and downs, most real but some perceived. I got a promotion without a raise, reached 5 years with Cirque/MGM, met some of the kids of my Salzburg group, ran up my credit card, went to a friend's wedding I never thought would get married, bought a new suit, had the worst hangover I've had in years- with my father-, went diving with sharks, wrote the first draft of a novel, churned out a couple of short stories, two short screenplays, started on two full-length screenplays, broke 100,000 miles with my car, fell in smitten, fell in smitten again (okay, so that was more or les a monthly occurrence), argued about politics and religion, argued about politics and religion again(okay, so that was more or less a daily occurrence), started to twitter, re-started to blog (and one day I might just transfer all the old ones over here. I feel dirty with them on MySpace). I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, but I leave it to you to work out which were the ups, which were the downs, and which were perceived to be either by me.

As to this year? I feel good about it. Despite not being able to stick to one of my resolutions for more than six minutes, and breaking a couple more a few hours later, it's going to be a good one. I've got to finish book one completely, I want to finish the first draft of book two, and the screenpl. . .you know what? This year is about finishing. I've always been good at starting things, so I'm going to work on seeing them through this year. Which is why I'm going to get up now, fix myself something to eat, and then sit down with my draft and keep slicing away at it.

Maybe this year I should work on editing my blogs before I post them too? Or at least re-reading them to see if I've made more of an arse out of myself as usual. . .