School and Writing Update

Well, I got some bad news regarding school. Summer classes at SCCC are completely full so there is not chance of me taking classes until fall. But I'm all registered for classes for fall so I have another three months of just looking for work each week and other than that, just sitting on my hands unless I get a job. I think I might try to do some volunteering work at one of the hospitals since I live on Capitol Hill, a mere blocks from all the major hospitals in Seattle. While the school thing is bad news for my nursing career, it's good news for my writing career. I decided to set some writing goals for myself.

So assuming I don't get a job, which is possible, my goal is to:

1. Find a reading club online, one where I can read other people's comments about various books, thus giving me the chance to understand what people are looking for in a book.
2. Read at least three books that are currently on the NYT bestseller list, giving me an idea of what is selling right now.
3. Finish writing "The Language of the Unheard"
4. Go back and give my screenplay a read-through. I'm skeptical that there will really be even enough to salvage from it, but I want to at least read it.
5. Figure out what I'm going to do with "Finding Innisburg." Currently I have stopped querying agents because I have become worried that the work is too short to be marketable. My grandma just finished reading it and she gave me a couple of places where she thought that I could add some in, so I might decide to do that. I don't want to query all the agents I can find if it is indeed too short in case I decide to change it.

As far as "The Language of the Unheard" goes, its coming along nicely. I've discovered something about myself in this process. If I have done a sufficient amount of planning and if the story is good and well-planned, I really enjoy the writing process. It's not a chore to crank out my word count every day. In fact, I'm enjoying this one so much that I haven't even had to make myself hit a required word count each day and I discovered with a shock last night that I have been averaging over 4000 words a day for the last five days. It currently stands at 20,445 and it's really flowing nicely. I haven't had any of those "I don't know what to say in this scene" scenes that I usually have; scenes that are integral to the story but no fun to write. Those scenes usually end up being the boring ones in the book when it's done and I am on scene seventeen without any of those sticky ones. I'm thinking of changing the title again, though, to "Zombie is a Bad Word." I think its more interesting and indicative of the subject matter. My only reservation about it, is it sounds like a comedy book, which it certainly is not supposed to be. It started out a little tongue-in-cheek but it's very serious now. I actually have forgotten at times that most of the time, zombies are bad. The zombies in my book are like children and only the people who hate them or are mean to them call them zombies. To everyone else, they are "residual humans" or RH's. So if you were browsing in a book store, would you be more likely to buy a book called "The Language of the Unheard" or "Zombie is a Bad Word"? The latter is more fun, but the former is more serious and the book is more serious. Tell me what you think.