What Did You Do This Week, Gail? Feb. 16 Edition

I had only three full days of work because we have a new family member, our second in six months, and that was diverting in the best possible way. I lost a little social media time in the evening because of the necessity of watching Olympic figure skating. It's on every evening, all evening, on NBC Sports. I want to be Adam Rippon! Then some evening time goes to planning a complex vacation for this fall, which is driving me crazy. We've been eating dinner in the living room (watching the Olympics, of course), because the dining room table is covered with road maps.

Nonetheless, I did some work.

Goal 1. Submissions. One thing I'm trying to do this year is squeeze submission research into days when I have a lot of nonwork obligations and can't spend a lot of time concentrating for big chunks of time. That way I'm getting something done on even a difficult day, and I'm actually making some progress on my submission planning. So yesterday and today, I got submission research in. Some good stuff, too.

Goal 2. YA Thriller. I brought a voice exercise for one of my characters to writers' group. I felt the voice wasn't there, myself, and someone gave some excellent feedback on that. I'm also skimming a book called Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering by Henry Petrowski. (Honest to God, I found this on my To Be Read shelf.) I need a  world, a life, for a dead engineer in this story, and I'm hoping reading some engineering essays will give me some ideas.

Goal 3. Generate New Work With Good Women. I'm still working on underpainting the Christmas pageant chapter. Hey, it's hard to create a Christmas pageant.

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding.  Four blog posts with promotion to Google+, Twitter, a Facebook community, a Goodreads journal post, and a writers' group meeting.

Back to the men's free skate.