Justine Larbalestier has a great post up called I’ll Know I’ve Made it as a Writer When… (yes, it’s old but it’s still fun and hides a valuable message beneath its crunchy comedic shell).

James Beamon posted a link to an old, but very interesting article on rejection by Marion Zimmer Bradley – Why Did My Story Get Rejected?. Well worth a read if your feeling the pain of rejection.

Coincidentally, I got my first rejection of the year today – for Backwards Boy. Not terribly surprising, I think it’s going to be a tricky story to sell.

Scott Bury has posted some great tips on editing on his blog – well worth a read. I’ve certainly been guilty of all those things are one point or another.

More edits to The Ghost Smuggler yesterday and I reached page 153 out of what has now become 170 manuscript pages (I’ve been cutting a few extraneous bits and pieces). I’m hoping to finish off the final revisions tonight but it’s also training night so that may be a stretch. Particularly as there’s a section I want to remove and that means reconnecting the story either side and rereading relevant chapters to make sure I haven’t introduced any continuity errors. Then I’ll be printing it out and sending it off for a critique. I need to do that by Thursday at the latest so training may have to wait.

I’ve also been chatting about the new book with Ethel the Muse and we may have come up with a title – I just need to let it roll around in my head and see if it sticks. I also reached the conclusion that I’m going to need to do some planning of the main characters for this one. Most of them will appear in the first few scenes of the book so it will be difficult to add new and interesting characters as I think of them while I’m writing. I need to know who they are at the start.

Thanks to Twitter, I also happened across an interesting Guest Blog by Scott Nicholson – Stages of a Writing Career. Well worth a quick read.