Winners and Weekend Goals!

So sorry for the delay in announcing the winners! I had to wait for my independent name picker (i.e. JP) and he's preparing for a trial and has been MIA recently (yes, in the end it wasn't my trial that kept us from our week at the beach, but his trial. Go figure!).

Anyway, I was so thrilled to have so many entries -- Thanks and welcome to all the new readers!! The two names JP drew from the hat are:

HEATHER and KIKI

Congratulations Heather and Kiki! The first one to email me at quitclaim [at] gmail.com gets their choice between the books! So email me and I'll arrange to get y'all's books to you!

For those of you who haven't visited my blog a lot (or ever before the contest) let me introduce you to my weekend goals. A while back, as a way to get accountability in my writing, I started to post my weekend goals and then updates on whether I accomplished anything. Well, I've been a bit slack and it's high time I get back into it.*

This morning I got my WIP back from Erica who did a kick-butt critique on it. I mean, she really dug in and made tons of wonderful and spot-on comments (even though I'm sure this was not really the type of book she was expecting!). Thanks Erica!! I'm still all giddy because she wrote in her email that she loves this story. LOVES THIS STORY!! YAY!!! I've gotten really great positive feedback from Diana (who's also muscling her way through WIP right now) but no one other than JP has every actually read the end before. So I was quite tense and scared and nail-bitey fearing that everything fell apart after the first 20k. But Erica loves this story! She even put in an exclamation point in her email :)

Of course, she found some plot problems (less plot problems and more "would they really do this?" stuff), some places where the heroine is too stupid to live, stuff like that. And she was right. But the good news is that it's fixable. It will take work, but I'm excited about it - because she brought up really good points and I know this is going to make WIP better.

So y'all can guess what my goal is for this weekend: start making edits on WIP based on Erica's crits! Yay!

I'm hoping to get the "easy" edits done by Tuesday because there's a good chance that JP's trial will be done then and we can still make it down to the beach. I'm hoping to be able to print out WIP and take it with me for another read (or I may wait for Diana's crits before reading it again -- right now I think I have some good distance and I'm afraid of reading it again before getting her thoughts and then not having distance.**)

Right now, I'm sitting on my couch with the wooden front door open so I can see out the glass door to the front yard. The air has that green tint to it - you know, that odd darkness of a storm creeping into the evening. The cats have been fighting over who gets to look out the door at whatever happens to be hopping, crawling, or darting across our yard. And the cicadas (or chucharras as my mom calls them) are going to town. To me, that is summer: the buzzsaw chirrups of chucharras in that odd slant of dusk.

So, what about y'all? What goals are you working towards?

_______
* y'all may notice I'm late in posting my goals. Naturally, that is because I knew I'd have to do something if I posted them and so I put of posting them so I could put off doing stuff. This is all about procrastination, after all...

** Yes, yes, way overthinking.