Happy to have missed my deadline(s).

Just over a year ago I had a plan.

I would write furiously for a couple of months so that my manuscript would be ready to send out to agents February 2009. I thought that this would be a great time to have my work sitting on agents' desks, because surely they would be refreshed from a Christmas holiday ready to receive new writers such as myself.

Little did I know, fourteen months later I would still be writing and a second Christmas deadline would have passed.

I was going to set a new time limit, until my friend Susan said, "Isn't the writing more important than the deadline?"

How right she was. In fact, if I had completed my first deadline, my book would have simply been a travel memoir. Instead, my writing has taken me on a journey which has led to my book's inclusion of the parallel story of my conflicting and unsatisfied desires as a woman and mother.

Although I know that my book still needs a lot of work, I am (secretly) hoping to have my manuscript sent out by April. If I can achieve this deadline it might be on the shelves by Christmas. No, I am not crazy, just full of imagination. Besides, I have to have a bestseller before Oprah ends her show!