Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me Down

I'm sorry, is not that the cutest picture ever? And I know I've used this title before, but its one of my favorite Carpenters songs.

Its pouring down rain here today, which required me to break out my adorable navy blue rainboots with the white polkadots and the pink trim in order to keep my feet from getting soaking wet.

My weekend was totally boring for the most part, except for Saturday night when I went out with one of my bestest friends to a lovely Indian restaurant called Surya in the West Village, where I had two delicious mango drinks after a very long day. It started at 6:00 when I had to get up to get downtown to the Tribeca Cinema for my volunteer assignment at the Film Festival. Basically it was putting out breakfast food for the teenage Film Festival Fellows. There were about 20 of them, who get to hang out at the festival, watch movies and then pitch a movie idea at the end of their week.

I was done by 10 am but after that I went over to the Philoctetes Center for a talk on Literature and Pyschoanalysis. I'll spare you what the talk was about because basically I spent the entire time making a list of Scandalous Women I want to write about. Productive but not really what the event was about. I did perk up whenever they started talking about Shakespeare and Freud vs. Jung which is one of my favorite topics.

After an unhappily brief conversation with cutie pie author, I had to run home because I had taken the wrong copy of the Helen Mirren autobiography for my friend. I had taken my copy not hers with the inscription from Helen Mirren. Luck was with me, because I managed to get home and back downtown in basically an hour.

Oh, and I received my Golden Heart scores which were interesting to say the least. It ran the gamut from a high of 9 to the low of 4.5 (which is exactly half of the highest score), the rest were 2 high 8's and a 7. Since there is no feedback, I'll never know why judge 3 hated the book so much and my judge 1 liked it a great deal. My average was 37.8 which was just shy of getting me into the top tier of judging.

I'm glad I entered the Golden Heart because it got me over my contest fears. I think everyone should enter a contest at least once in their writing life, whether its a contest for unpubbed or pubbed like the RITA's. I may even enter MUCH ADO ABOUT HIGH SCHOOL, in the Stiletto contest or even another RWA contest. Who knows!

In the meantime, for those who live in the tri-state area, stay dry!

Thanks for reading,

EKM

Contest Queen

"Contest Queen, Young and Sweet, Only Forty-Three, Contest Queen, hear the beat from the tambourine, oh yeah!"

Well, I'll be forty-three after my next birthday, but you get the idea. All of a sudden after having avoiding contests for years, I've now entered 3! Yes, I have added the Golden Heart and Amazon's Breakthrough Author Award to my list of contests which include the Brava Novella Contest.

I'm not sure why I've avoided contests, the only reason I can think of is that I've been so focused on writing, and querying agents that I just haven't had the chance to enter. Also, the contest has been a deterrant. Up until two years ago, I was living from paycheck to paycheck temping while I pursued writing and acting. Much of 2003 was spent unemployed. I only had enough money to pay rent, pay my therapist and take yoga classes five days a week. I was down to eating like two meals a day or sometimes one in order to have money. Unemployment only pays $364/week.

But now I'm a little flush, so I thought what the heck! Of course, sending 6 partials, 6 synopses, and the full is not going to be cheap, but I'm sending the full on a disk, so that should make it lighter.

Now I just have to figure out what my next step is in terms of writing. I have two chick-lit romantic comedy paranormals to rewrite, and I still have to finish the YA that I started several months ago. Of course, since coming back from NJRW, my mind has been teeming with ideas, including two erotic romances. MF and I came up with a fun idea, which actually might work better as a screenplay where you have the visuals.

So right now, I have one YA partial, one YA idea, 2 full length novels that need to be rewritten and a chick-lit paranormal that needs to be researched and written. Since NaNoWriMo is coming up, I thought I would finish the YA to see if it actually works as a novel, and just plug in later the stuff that I need to research.

Unless I change my mind.

EKM

Oh, and I went to see the Jennifer Lopez/Marc Anthony concert on Sunday. If she's not pregnant, then she's lost whatever fashion sense that she had, because her costumes all consisted of variations on a caftan! They were so beyond fugly. He was electrifying, she needs to stay away from ballads because she has a hard time staying in tune. But they looked very adorable together when they sang their two duets at the end.