My goals and their results for last month were:

  • Help promote the release of the anthology WARRIOR (which contains my latest short story: Glass Bones) – newsletter, blog, social media. Even made my mum read it ;p
  • Revise Glass Slippers – started, but this is a bigger job than anticipated. I’ve compiled all the feedback, but I need to analyse what I really want the story to be, so I know what to include and what to not, then figure out all the hows  (I’ve started some of that, but still more to do)
  • Revise Charming Rivals – did not even start this
  • Begin the first draft of Nothing Charming nor this
  • Finish the first draft of Light In The Deep – completed the first draft yesterday (by the skin of my teeth) at 10,800 words
  • Do a bunch of research on tension – I read a bunch of articles, read (and re-read) some sections in writing books on it, and read a couple of novels touted by others as good examples of the use of tension. Overall I think I’ve got a much better grasp on it, but I’m still struggling with how exactly I broke the tension in the scene this problem was brought up in ;p

Considering I was up against school holidays, floods and funerals, toothache and toddler tantrums, a swollen arm and my shift key won’t work (no kidding, after the latest toddler attack on my laptop neither of my shift buttons work.  At all, I’m either using caps lock or copy and pasting symbols from other documents ;p ), I think I did pretty damn well.

This month I need to:

  • Do some beta feedback for people who’ve betaed for me – this might be a big job, or small, depending on how much feedback the stories will need. I guess I’ll just have to see.
  • Complete my self edits of Mudgerwokee and send it on to my editor for the professional edits
  • Fix my damn shift key. No seriously you have no idea how maddening it is writing without one
  • Finalise the print version of Darkest Depths for my writers group so we can finally get this up and happening
  • Finish revision on Glass Slippers
  • Start writing the first draft of Nothing Charming

Those last two are really going to depend on how much time the first goal ends up taking up ;p I’m also hoping to face just a little less adversity this month – but you can never count on that ;p

I also have a stretch goal of putting some of my old short stories that are long since out of their contract period up for individual purchase, but we’ll see how things go.