Writing Wednesday, Lots to Celebrate

This has been a really good week for me, writing wise. First off, I made it to the quarter finalist round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award!!!!

I entered with my novel, Antigone: The True Story, and I'm so excited to have made it this far that I had to go look at the list several times just to make sure that my name was really on the list.

Two Amazon Vine reviewers read the first 5000 words and commented on it. They said that it was "flawless", "the descriptive narration was excellent and the plot line strong", and it "will fascinate most readers." The quote that I'm most floored by is: "Outstanding introduction by an extraordinarily talented author. Targeted for a 'young adult' audience, I believe that it will call out to a wide age range. I am looking forward to its release!" Honestly, I am speechless and overwhelmed, even embarrassed to post all this here (but I'm also so excited and want to share).

If anyone would like to read the excerpt, you can go to Amazon and download it (for free) by clicking on this link. The next round will be announced on April 16 when each category will be whittled down from 100 to 25. For this round, someone from Publishers Weekly will read the whole thing. Eek.

Since entering the contest, however, I have decided to add to the novel because the ending was niggling at me, so have been frantically working on Part III.  I set a goal recently to write a minimum of 1500 words a day minimum until it is done, hopefully bashing out the rest of the rough draft by March 15. So far, I've had 9 days in a row where I've met my goal, and this is despite my brain trying to sabotage me (ie, it's daylight savings and you've lost an hour, Sunday's don't count, the kids are home sick, I didn't get a good night's sleep...). I'm happy to say that having my goal has kept me going through all of that. I've been using Scrivener, and there's even a little bar graph thingy that tells you how far you need to go at any given moment. I'm really visual, so this works for me.

So, two amazing things this week: making the quarter finals and the end is in sight on my rough draft of Part III. I would love to hear from others how your creative projects are going. How do you stay on target? What have you got to celebrate?