Delicious vintage blog makeover!

Whilst perusing my fellow bloggers' sites this weekend I came across a cool template, which led me to ShabbyBlogs where they have all this amazing free stuff!  I love vintagey themed things, and they have it galore over there.  So, I chose a Christmas background for this month and I'm already trying to decide what I'll change it to in January.  They also have cool blinky buttons, which you'll see I've sprinkled liberally through my sidebar... the one at the top is actually a set of quotes I have up in my bedroom, so I was stoked to see it available for my blogging home.

Anyways, editing updates: I sort of finished my major rewrite last night.  By sort of I mean that I got all the way through to the end, connecting all of the new scenes I wrote so that everything is integrated with no gaping hole plots.  But one thing I realized I had to do was remove a lot of pages from the end - I had about a 45 page wrap up after the final climatic scene, and that just won't work.  So, I slashed ruthlessly down to 20 pages, which is still sort of a lot, but it works.  Now, I just want to go back and plump a little here and there earlier in the book to bring my word count back up.

Speaking of makeovers, I've also decided I want to change the name of my novel, because I don't think it's snazzy enough.  I spent some time last night making a list of keywords for my book and some possible new titles.  I also wrote a brand new query letter in like five minutes, which is amazing for me (usually I agonize about it for several hours).  So, I guess I kind of did a total novel makeover, with lots of juicy new scenes, a new name and a new query.  I'm going to wait until after the holidays, and then it's round three of querying!

So, writer friends, how are your projects going?  Are you writing?  Editing?  Querying?  Waiting for your book to be published?  What are your writing resolutions for the new year?