It's Been a Grand Weekend

Especially for Whovians. Also those still mourning the passing of John Fitzgerald Kennedy--now that's a morbid cosmic coincidence. And somewhere between joy and tragedy lie the Hobbit fans, with the Battle of Five Armies also falling on November 23rd (warning: may be spoilers through the wikia link).

For me, it's also been the culmination of several weeks of intense labor, interspersed with perhaps more procrastination than strictly speaking necessary. And also with my awesome part-time internship blogging for Amani DC, including this announcement of our new local job skills training program, a piece I've felt especially proud of. Unfortunately, in blogging for them I'm afraid blogging for myself has sometimes slipped my mind.

I've also found little to blog about, and, again, haven't had a lot of time for it--all because these past weeks have been filled by my last push to finish the Starter Guide for Professional Writers. And, as of this weekend, I've done it!

This is much, much later than I expected or would have preferred to finish it, although there's a reason even for that. As I wrote the second draft, I expanded in a lot of areas, not least to include my lessons from running crowdfunding campaigns and preparing to self-publish through CreateSpace and Smashwords. The Starter Guide is more than twice as long as I planned--90,000 words instead of 40,000! Hopefully this means it will have even more useful information for writers on finishing, editing, publishing, and promoting their stories!

It still needs to undergo a final copyedit and  formatting, but I assume I will be able to release and distribute it not longer after I return from Thanksgiving. I'll be visiting my family after a particularly rough summer, so we'll see how that goes. There are many people back in Wisconsin that I miss--and I'll also be meeting some fellow Whovian friends at the Chicago TARDIS convention the weekend of December 1st. Paul McGann will be there, and so, of course, will Plushie Eighth Doctor (for non-Whovians, that's McGann's character).

(That's the little guy sitting on the shoulder of the woman in the picture. As for that woman, um, I'm not quite sure who she is, but she's wearing a devilishly stylish shirred tunic from One Mango Tree, Fair Trade apparel carried in the Amani DC store. I need to do a fashion post someday, although being ~fashionable is quite the new experience for me.)

Once publishing the Starter Guide is out of the way, I'll be devoting my energy to more systematically approaching my job search. In the meantime, I'm also seeking more freelance editing gigs, and you can find me on Fiverr and Elance. I admit, I'm pretty delighted to score in the top 5% for Creative Writing testers on Elance.