I belong to a great group on Writers Digest Community It’s callled “Weekly Chapter Challenge.” If you sign up for the Writers Digest Community website (which is great, by the way), you can the join the group. Then you can post a request and ask for a “Chapter Buddy.” I signed up at the beginning and have been exchanging chapters of my current work in progress, a middle grade novel tentatively entitled “Don’t Ask Me Why,” for over two months now. And don’t bother asking me why I called my book that.

We exchange a chapter of each of our works — we try to send on Sunday, and the following Sunday, we send back comments on our buddie’s previous week’s chapter and send along our new one.

Thanks to my buddy, EJ Wesley (Check out his blog — The Open Vein) I’ve made terrific progress. I’m staring the second half of my book in the face at the moment — I’m not quite sure how many more chapters I’ll have, mostly because they’re not yet written.

All I can say is that EJ’s comments have been so, so helpful, and having to be accountable to someone for a new chapter every (or almost every — we’ve skipped a week here and there) week is fabulous.

Do check out the group, and see what you think.

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I recently was lucky enough to find a chapter buddy, someone with whom I have started exchanging chapters of my new work in progress. I’m now convinced that I will eventually finish this opus — I’m working my way through a revision, and by the end, it should actually be coherent and readable.

Of course, this now has me obsessing over what I’m going to write next. {shakes head}. Some authors are never satisfied.

Now if y’all are writers and would like to get a buddy, check out http://community.writersdigest.com/
group Weekly Chapter Challenge http://community.writersdigest.com/group/weeklychapterchallenge

And do check out my buddy E.J. Wesley’s new blog, The Open Vein http://the-open-vein-ejwesley.blogspot.com/

I use wordpress for this blog, and they have a pretty good spam filter. Nonetheless, I check the comments marked “spam” to see if any legitimate posts have been flagged, and often they have been.

How do you rate your spam filter? Do you check spam on your blog? On your email? I do for both.

I wish I could trust the software 100% — but I can’t.

How about you?

I’m getting ready to send out my chapter book, The Angry Little Boy. Well, actually, I’m sitting here writing on my blog instead of going over my manuscript again for typos, grammatical errors, inconsistencies, and the like.

No, really, I’m thinking about it — deep, serious questions like whether to start from the first chapter or the last.

This time probably from the first — I do tend to start from the beginning.

Back when I was renting movies, I had this epiphany when I realized that I hadn’t gotten around to renting the then-new latest Star Trek movie (not this latest one — haven’t seen that one either, though) which was out on video, because it was at the back of the alphabet and I always started looking from the front.

Right then and there I started alternating.

Ah, Procastination, right now your name is Blogging…

My now, sadly, unwritable former blog can be accessed through the page “old blog” or the line “old blog” on the blogroll

old one seems to be hosed at the moment — major bummer….