Bogged down...I signed up for several books; I'm reading three full ones at once, plus another I promised to do for a friend. Two are not bad; the third is ok too except hard to follow. What I really need for that third is an entire evening to concentrate on it, and not keep leaving it out of frustration for having it be hard to follow. It's taught me to always make my books easy to follow. Characters, easy to picture. Action coming from previous action. A direction where it's going.

Forgive the sentence fragments; they are a product of frustration. Really, the grammar I'm dealing with at the moment is much better. I've learned to pick up bad-grammar signals from the blurbs themselves, and, if someone can put bad grammar in a blurb, know that it's not going to get better in the book itself. I no longer hold out hope for books that sound ok in the blurb but show signs of a writer's lack of purpose, or lack of attention to basic sentence structure.

Aside from that, my main frustration with this read-marketing biz is that I can't seem to do enough of it. I try to make time for it at night and in the morning, but I try to make time to write also, and haven't done enough of that. And the writing has two kinds, the organizing (which includes the research), and the writing itself. In novels, the organizing is my weak point. If I don't know what's going to happen, I can't sit there staring at the page; I get blocked. With the biography, I have to go out of my way to find the kind of thing that's appropriate to read.

I'm working on my general writing pattern, trying to find a balance, and do enough of each. It could take a while. Meanwhile it's a cold February, and there isn't much else to do. The afternoon sun comes in my window now. I think warmly of my author friends around the globe, who are struggling with the same issues.