The holiday season always catches me off guard. I'm never prepared, even though Thanksgiving and Christmas come around the same time every year. It's always difficult to focus on writing when there are family functions to organize, food to cook and gifts to buy. As much as I love all the madness, I've never figured out how to stay ahead of it.

The nice thing about holidays is that they usually afford you more time at home. But, this is rarely used for writing projects, the purpose is to spend that extra time with family. So, to stay motivated, here are my top five ways to keep writing during holidays:

5) For every chapter I write I get a slice of pumpkin pie
4) Family gatherings will become focus groups to help me work out plot problems
3) I can setup my computer at the dinner table so I can write in between courses.
2)To avoid Christmas shopping, I'll just give everyone chapters from my book

And my number one solution for staying motivated to write during the holidays is...

1) Convince my husband that the number of pages I write between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the amount of money he must spend on my Christmas gift

New writers quickly learn that the first step to getting a publisher to read a manuscript is to send a query letter. These letters are your first and sometimes only chance to pitch your book idea. They're your first impression and an opportunity to show how well you understand the industry.

The movie industry has the same process in place for weeding out potentially bad scripts. I recently discovered a very amusing site where a cynical movie big-wig posts the disasterous movie pitches he's received. This site is as hilarious as it is educational.

It's not hard to figure out why most of these letters end up in the trash bin, but it does make you wonder how some Hollywood scripts, like White Chicks and Gigli, ever slipped through the cracks.

Check out Query Letters I Love.

Last month was a difficult writing month for me. This is clearly reflected in the fact that I posted exactly one entry in my blog for October and that was for the first of the month. I had a lot going on, not the least of which is my health, but I still know I could have done better.

My husband and I have been talking seriously about my quitting my day job and writing full time, so learning to maintain a steady writing schedule will be important. How can I call myself a professional writer if I still haven't figured out how to write steadily? The answer is that I'm really good at procrastinating and making excuses. It's a miracle that I managed to complete 9 novels in the last few years.

So to help me get back on track, I found these Ten Tips to Help You Overcome Procrastination really useful.