The relocation thing has definitely taken a toll on my business and writing life, but I did finally get in a good developmental session with my new project. After picking up Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife once more and hoping to finish it this time, I am struck by how amazing a young writer she is.

The gift of language isn't taught; it is merely honed an cultivated. I'm convinced true literary greatness comes from the soul, and the greatest of it must be inherited by some divine birthright. Whether that literary greatness ever comes to complete fruition or success is another matter altogether, one in which I am still currently embroiled.

After four inexplicable manuscript losses at agencies, my manuscript still has only been read by one agent, who highly praised it and asked to see more work in the future, work that is more along the lines of magical realism. This new project, I suspect, may end up being that--even though the initial opening written during last year's NaNoWriMo quickly turned into a fantastical sort of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon kind of thing. Drawing it back to earth will be interesting.

Playing around with the narrative structure is fun, and this will be an interesting exploration of third person multiple POV, with flashes back and into a first person present storyline, much like Obreht's first novel.

Non-writing and writing friends alike are stymied by this strange blockade to my manuscript. Gremlins, perhaps, spiriting away electronic files and erasing to-do lists from agents' memories? At this point, I'm not ruling out anything.

One thing is certain, though. I know that the race is won by those who persevere. And twelve years of personal suffering before healing has taught me how to persevere. I will finish this race well.

Seriously, being the one woman show wears on me at times.

Business is picking up with the holiday season and,  I think, the fact that the American public is nearing the tipping point of awareness about celullar and wireless technologies maybe not being so good for your brain cells. But I know you don't want to hear that, because if you're a writer, you're probably engaged in a torrid love affair with your iPhone, tablet, and/or laptop with its oh-so-heavenly ability to enable you to write in virtually any Starbucks in the world.

Yep, so the NaNoWriMo thing was a bit ambitious, but, as all things in life, prioritizing comes with choices. I made the choice to honor the previous business commitments I'd made in October (and all summer long, really) to get my online store up and running, and as much as I would have loved to shut everything else off and just write in a secluded cabin in the woods for 30 days straight, my life had to go on, meals had to be prepared, bills needed to be paid, blah blah blah. This is the no-win situation of any artist or author struggling to find professional validation for their work.

The most important thing I've learned from this experience is to embrace every choice I make and see it not as a loss for my writing, but as a gain for whatever else I decide must take priority over my creative pursuits. It's all about how much time I have, and what activity is the best use of that time. Writing novels as a careers is a business just like any other, and balancing two careers will be challenging, but I've gotten to the point where I know from experience that ideal writing circumstances are rare. You either sacrifice your standard of living, and sometimes your paying job, and maybe even your family, to write. Or you write less and keep all of those wonderful things.

Writing for a living and paying the bills is a doable thing. It must be approached from a business standpoint, though. Money isn't going to come floating down from those mythical money trees on Mt. Olympus. You still have to be a productive member of the workforce and society to keep up, and you have to adapt your creative process to work in harmony with it.

You writers may think it terribly anti-Bohemian of me, but there it is. My business sense is winning the battle.

Let's just say trying to write uninterrupted for 30 days during a major holiday season is something of a pipe dream. But at least I know I'm capable of writing upwards of 2500-3000 words a day, something I never would have thought possible before this grand experiment.

I'll continue my NaNoWriMo into December and January, and my goal is to have a 100,000-word first draft done by January 31st.

Yay for metrics and tracking charts. Yay for Scrivener, which has made my NaNoWriMo experience quite enjoyable from a logistical standpoint.

Yay for everyone else who joined in on this wonderful adventure of creative madness. No, it's not over yet. Who knows. Anything is possible.

But first, I must go house-hunting in Tulsa. Life happens. The writing must go on in spite of it...