Sunday, March 5, 2017

There should be a word for between-goal feelings

The Inuit people have fifty words for snow. It's a big deal to them, obviously. Over the course of my lifetime, I have seen a trend towards more discussion and importance tied to emotions and emotional states. People have spent a lot of time classifying fears into phobias. Granted, fear being the strongest emotion, it probably makes sense to go there first, but what time have we spent on naming the other feelings?

Today I want to focus on that feeling you get AFTER you achieve a goal and BEFORE you decide your next. For me, it's a combination of contentment and pride, but also restlessness and malaise. Having hit two goals in one week, I'm stuck in that in-between-place now. So what is this I'm feeling? Is there a name for it?

I checked Google, and it pointed me to a promising page on Psychpage.com, which lists names for feelings by category. It's interesting to note that we have more names for negative feelings than positive ones. Vocabulary.com has a list devoted to feelings, but they're in alphabetical order, not categorized.

So where's the "sniglet" for "motivated and inspired but currently seeking new goal"? I guess until I find the word, I'll just focus on short-term goals.

Today's short term goals: Catch up on mid-progress edit notes done by my wife/editor, review the last three chapters again, get back on my diet track after a "cheat day," and watch "Logan."

Monday, January 30, 2017

Editing takes so long!

Progress report on Book 2...

The first pass at editing RELUCTANT TO BITE is done. Thanks Mom! The wife has finished editing a few chapters into her first pass of what's now revision 3. At least it's not a dozen-plus, like REBORN TO BITE! It's registered at the Copyright office. Next step is getting a beta reader from my writer's group, and submitting to Kirkus and RT for reviews. Once I do those submissions, I'll have a 60-day clock or so for the release date.

Progress report on Book 3...

At this point, Book 3 (Formerly titled "Forced to Bite", but now I'm going with FORCED FROM THE SHADOWS) is in a state of disarray. It's about 100k words based on Rev 1 of Book 1. But as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I did a dozen revisions to book 1. Along the way, things changed. RELUCTANT grew out of those changed plot elements, which of course causes things to change again. Also, I was playing with POV (Point of View) changes in Book 3. My plan is to change everything to Sabine's POV as I go through and rewrite to get rid of all the stuff that changed. And I need to trim out about 20k words, so there's that too.