Day -24 and counting

Just 24 more days until the beginning of the 2009 NaNoWriMo. Today is a cold rainy day. Today is the kind of day for beef stew and biscuits and that's just what we're having for supper. I wrote so much yesterday and the day before that today I woke up and couldn't think of much to do except edit my first novel some more. I know they say that there's always things that can be written and rewritten in a novel and each time you look at it, there's always something that can be done. It's a lot like when you own a home. It may look good to everyone else but there's always something that you know needs fixed or replaced or added to. I haven't done much though. Of all things to start changing, I started on the first page. I can't tell you why, but it doesn't have the look I'd want the first page of my novel to have. It seems sparse and barren. Maybe it's because my writing skills have been used so much since I wrote it that I'm actually a better, more critical writer than I was when I first wrote it. Maybe I need to really sit down with it and give it a good going over.

One of the issues I have with the book is that there doesn't seem to be enough detail. They say that historical novels need to have a lot of details to indicate that they are in an earlier time period. Maybe that's why I haven't had the success with the agents that I'd like to have. If I'm not satisfied with what I've written, who else is going to?

Last night our daughter was reading the Little House on the Prairie series and then she got on the computer and watched some of the videos about the television show. I had read the books when I was a couple of years older than she is and then I watched the original series. Plus because we live close to Mansfield,Mo where Laura wrote the books, I'm really familiar with the true story. It kind of makes me a Little House Expert, you know? Anyway, I was watching the videos and she was asking me questions about the show, the books, and what really happened. The television show takes from both the books and what really happened and then adds it's own creation to the stories.As I was telling my daughter about what I knew, my husband commented that I knew too much about the show. I was a fan. Little House was one of the motivating factors of why I like to write historical fiction.