Planning....and forgetting

I typed up a plan of the projects I'm going to do over the next few months, then immediately got sidetracked.

Yesterday, I got the edits for my novella (coming...this winter, I hope), "Henri et Marcel". They weren't onerous at all, so either it's awesome or my editor isn't strict enough. And since I lack self-confidence most of the time, I'm going to say she wasn't strict enough. Anyway, I went through the stuff she did want fixed and am now going to be sure the plot structure holds together. I've checked it before, but honestly, I want people to love this as much as I do.

You might have guessed from the title, this is Male/Male romance. And anyone who has read the first two books in my 17th century French series will know who these guys are. (Indispensable Wife introduces Henri, Honorable Officer has him meet Marcel. Then they appear in Chevalier, too, mostly as Emmanuel gets to know Henri, the prickliest of his brothers, better). BUT there are no sex scenes. There is attraction, affection, cuddling, a few kisses, and a bit of implied they-had-sex-last-night.

Yeah, sorry, all my friends who like m/m sex scenes. I have enough trouble publishing m/f sex. Oh, I'm blushing just mentioning it.

There is more explicit sex in the NA/Chick Lit series and even more in the contemporary romance I'm working on, but I'm still not planning on getting categorized as erotic.

The novella takes place immediately after Chevalier, ten years after Henri and Marcel moved in together to work for Jean-Louis (the Honorable Officer himself) at the furniture factory. Henri returns to Paris and pulls something in his upper back and is in constant pain. My critique partner asked if he had meningitis. Well, no. His symptoms are the ones I had a year ago this spring, when my shoulder froze up due to my messed up upper spine.

Anyway, this post was going to be about planning, but I got sidetracked.

Right.

1) I've got a solid first draft of the contemporary romance I wrote the second half of (I wrote the first half a few years ago and got stuck, so went back and edited it heavily and deleted the last chapter or so and went from there). It will go on the back burner for a little bit and then I'll come back and edit it, give it to my critique partners, then start submitting it. So that's done, even though it wasn't even on my original plan.

2) Finish edits of Henri et Marcel.

3) Edit Melisande (Book 4, Chateaux and Shadows). My crit partners might have already read this one, at least in part. Submit to Wild Rose in...September, I hope.

4) Edit/proofread/get a cover for Christmas Spirit. Release October? November? Well before Christmas, anyway.

5) Through all this, keep querying Chill, my NA/Chick Lit book based on the soundtrack to the Big Chill.

6) November means NANOWRIMO! So I hope to finish Hot Rocks (the second NA/Chick Lit) and finish Dario (Book 6, Chateaux and Shadows). Each is to or past the halfway point. And I know NaNoWriMo is supposed to be a new project and a short novel, but I'll use the deadline this way, instead.

7) Edit Francoise (Book 5, C&S), which takes place more than ten years after Chevalier and Henri and is the story of their niece, Cedric's daughter and how she has to choose which twin to marry, which will be the way they pick which is the heir. I hope to get this to my publisher by early 2017.

8) THEN I can edit Dario and turn him in. He's currently the last in my French series, but he and his heroine open up a can of worms left over from the first book. I still have ideas for more French stories, maybe about other cousins, maybe about other people in Louis XIV's court.

Oh, and I need an actual out-of-my-home job, preferably part time, though after so many years out of the job market, I'm sort of weak in the resume. I look at job postings and realize I don't have the actual experience they require or that my experience is so old that it's not so relevant. I know a lot of people are in that situation. So anyway. If you live near me, let me know if you hear of something...

Or in my home, but an actual legit job, you know, not a pyramid scheme. I've done business proofreading/editing. It was a bit crazy, what with all this business buzzwords (Incentivize still isn't a word) that made me groan and laugh, but I was pretty good at it.