Life After NaNo, writing and reading and what's next

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One goal accomplished - NaNo won. A few days early, yesterday largely spent freaking out about corrupted files, but all verified in the end and I have an assortment of lovely NaNo 2010 winner badges to choose from and slap on this here blog space and/or Facebook.

One of my critique partners asked me what I'm going to do with my mornings now that NaNo is done, and I told her that's a good question. After spending every morning of the past month dragged along behind Slate and Melanie as they blazed along their path to Happily Ever After...at least rough draft edition...facing a new course for the mornings is...odd.

Not that I'm out of stuff to write. :pause for maniacal laughter: I'm polishing one complete ms that has been garnering some interest and calendar will be marked for my local RWA chapter's Book in Six Weeks project (same thing as NaNo, but with two extra weeks) when we set a start date for some time in January or February. This means that in the deep freeze of winter, I will be in Regency era England with star-crossed lovers Anthony and Christine and their tale of PTSD, opium addiction, her class conscious family and Anthony's sister who loves him a little too much and not in the right way. I consider that good company. :cackles:

I'm also seriously behind on a project concieved with Evangeline Holland of Edwardian Promenade, but hope to get back on that one soon. Then there's the need to start splashing around in the idea soup of whatever historical is to come next. This one is going to be messy and may involve surgery on another ms that is on life support. Now taking suggestions for undesirable classes of society and/or paralell societies with which a well bred young woman should not mix.

As I am a big proponent of "nothing in, nothing out" this means that I need to keep up my reading to fuel my writing. NaNo didn't leave a lot of time for reading, so I am now ready to plow through the TBR shelves. Most recent conquest there is The Master and His Muses by Amanda McIntyre. I loved that this book didn't pull any punches about life in the world of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, or the complex emotions involved in relationships that don't work out and how those affect the ones that do. Three stories, three HEAs, so these are romances.

Now that that's read, I'm looking at the following:

The Iron Duke - Meljean Brook
Seven Nights To Forever - Evangeline Collins
To Conquer a Highlander - Mary Wine