My birthday is just about a month away and I thought I might try something fun.

It’s my birthday but I am going to give you the presents! I have partnered with GoodReads to do a special giveaway of some of my most popular books. These giveaways are free to enter and end on my birthday (October 16th).

GoodReads handles the drawings to make sure there is no funny stuff so if you aren’t a remember yet, you can create a free account now. Once you have logged into your account, you can click the big Enter to win button on any of the giveaways below.

The drawing is random so it doesn’t matter how late or how early you enter so place your name in the hat now so you don’t forget.

You can enter drawings for all or just one of the books, it’s up to you! Increase your chances the more books you put in an offer for.

To enter the drawing for a particular book, click the relevant link below.

• The Love of Three Oranges
• The Trading Assistant’s Assistant: How to start a part-time job or full-time consignment drop-off business on eBay
• The Author

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that YOU are the one to win!

There was an article that I read somewhere that I didn’t care enough to take note of where it was that said that the English language would reach 1 million words in 2009. Oh, fine, you guilt-ed me into looking it up. Here is the article.

Because there is something wrong with me, I read that and my first thought was, “I should make that my new writing goal.” Yes, Hillary. You failed to even complete 50,000 words this year during NaNoWriMo (yeah, notice how I’ve been real quiet about that? It’s a sore issue, we’ll get to it later.) For those of you playing along at home, 1 million words in a year means writing about 2,740 words a day, 19,230 words a week or 83,333 words a month. Yeah, that is like 20 NaNoWriMos in less than 20 months. In short, that is insane.

I wrestled with the idea for a few days and then finally decided that, even if I were to count all my blog posts, this was still insane and I should drop this idea. This was a rare moment of sanity from me and I think shows growth.

Of course, however, some of my writing buddies that I follow online had the same idea and are actually doing it. We aren’t even done with January and quite a few of them are finished with 100,000 words or more. I would love to say that they make me sick but, frankly, I am jealous. Every book about writing that I have ever read makes it clear that the most important thing is discipline and making time to write every single day. Dude, I don’t have time to sleep every single day so I am definitely not writing every day. The only reason The Whine Seller is a mostly daily blog is because I write a week’s worth of posts in advance and just schedule them to post one a day. But I really should be writing every day and that is the problem.

It all comes down to discipline though, in my case, a little time management wouldn’t hurt. I am becoming convinced that I should be able to work less than I do if I just order my work better. I’m not saying I am ever going to have gobs of free time but I think I could have less, OMG OMG days.

I was thinking of setting myself a 250,000 words in 2009 which is a far more conservation estimate but then I decided instead to just make a list of projects and go with that instead of word count. Ready for the list?

My writing goals for 2009 are:

• Finish that damn novel I have been working on forever. You know the one.
• re-write and start to send out to agents/publishers a children’s story I wrote 3 years ago and only just found in a pile of junk on my desk while cleaning
• Type up and polish the play I wrote, by hand, in a crazed fit in the middle of the night like a nutcase
• Re-do The Love of Three Oranges into the long awaiting school age version (that people have been begging me for for years)
• The podcast of The Author (about 1/3 done and sounding really awesome!)
• Do the newest edition of The Trading Assistant’s Assistant and podcast of that
• Complete both Script Frenzy 2009 (for which I have a really awesome idea for a play that I haven’t told anyone about besides Jill who told me it sounded cool though, to be fair, she is one of my best friends so what else was she going to say?) and NaNoWriMo 2009

Yes, this is a tall order. But I also think its a do-able order. I just need to kick my butt into gear.

What do you think? Impossible or possible?

So I recorded a few sections of my podiodbook last night.

First the good news:

• My microphone is better quality than I thought and sounds just fine so I don’t need a new one
• It was a lot of fun to read my book out loud (yes, I am a dork)
• I should be able to get this done in less time than I originally thought

Now for the bad news:

• I breathe waaaaay too loud. My brother taught me how to fix this though so we should be OK on the next take.
• I have found a lot of typos/awkward sentences/etc that I need to fix. I am going to have to do some heavy text editing before I can actually do a final recording of anything. On the plus side, I needed to do an edit of the book anyway to add in the new TA info that eBay changed so it is for the better in the long run but annoying when you wanted to be done yesterday
• After I unplugged my headphone/microphone combo, all sound on my computer stopped working. I have monkeyed with all the settings that I can think of and no luck. I am hoping it will just fix itself out of pity in a few hours. In the meantime, all sound is broken on my computer a fact I re-discover every few seconds when I try to listen to something

I am doing the book of The Trading Assistant’s Assistant first as it is pretty straight forward. The Author I suspect will be much harder so I am waiting until I get some solid practice in to do that.

I will keep you all posted on how this disaster goes.