Happy New Year!!!

Let’s hope you all managed to survive it. If not, hair of the dog, yanno. Cheers!

Me? I spent NYE crippled and useless from tramping through one too many Disney parks. I have sent hubby and spawn on their own today – be gone! Vacation is for peace and quiet, not for rubbing elbows with smelly, cranky strangers all bent on kidney-punching their way to the next attraction.

I am blissfully alone this New Year’s Day in our lovely timeshare enjoying balmy Florida weather while working on polishing my novel.  I do this because…… <drum roll> my brainstorm friends and I have declared 2013 to be THE year!!!

Yes, that’s right. We intend to kick ass and take names in 2013. You heard it first here, folks.

Our small B&N Brainstorming community has been meeting regularly for just over a year now. We each have a nearly-finished project to launch trebuchet-style into the publishing world with grand hopes of making a ginormous splat of success against one of the walls of the big six (or whatever number it is now that some houses have combined into ridiculous mash-up names).

Our collective goal is to aggressively market our novels and hook ourselves an agent and/or book contract. To this, I solemnly vow.

I know, I know. Book contracts are not something we can personally control unless we self-publish. I know this. But I also know, that you can’t get one simply by sitting on your hopes and thumbs wishing you had one, either.

You need to take action. You need to: Write. Finish. Polish. Polish AGAIN (and again, and again, ad nauseum until it’s your absolutely best work). Then, you must SUBMIT. Yes, submit. Submit to the whims of the publishing world. Trebuchet your baby out there! Be free! Best wishes! Good luck!

And hope that someone cares enough to catch it.

That is the ACTION. That is what we can CONTROL. Only you can write your story. Only you can research the market and try to get it into the hands of the right agents and editors you know will love it. After that, it’s all luck and circumstance, baby.

And then you fuhggeddaboudit and begin work on your next novel.

There are a couple of agents waiting with their nets poised that I intend to aim at. I am poised and ready, because 2013 is THE year I want to make my goal of acquiring representation happen. That’s my Action. That’s me taking Control.

TREBUCHET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  FLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What do you intend to make happen in 2013?