Oh hello.  I half expect this thing to be gone when I can’t get back to it for more than a week.  Which is silly, considering it took about four years for that stupid Angelfire site with my college poetry on it to finally disappear.  (I lost the password.  It was pretty harrowing there for a while, guys.)  Anyway, half of March has happened, and that’s rude.  While January and February seemed to have blasted by March is practically limping along.  It feels like it might never end.  On one hand, that gives me so much time to write!  On the other hand, it’s just rubbing in how much writing I haven’t done.  But first thing’s first, back to…

February.

Words: 8,627.  Yes, merely a measly eight and a half thousand.  A backslide that might never end.

Flubs: In looking at the things I wanted to have done through the end of February I have not: a) finished a draft of Volunteer Vampires, b) let alone have one polished enough to submit somewhere, and c) have not made it halfway through the rough of my half of the Steampunk novel.  And that’s all incredibly depressing.  I can’t feel too bad about Volunteer Vampires though, because I’ve definitely sorted out where I’m going with it and just need to sit down and put one word after another on it.

Follow Throughs: I HAVE, however, written one poem for the express purpose of submitting it to an online poetry zine and have gone about polishing another one up so I can either submit it to a magazine or enter a contest with it.  I know, contests are what people with talent and faith in themselves do, but I am knee deep in faking it until I make it over here, so I might as well go for broke.  I’ve also started another short story for a call requesting lesbian steampunk fiction set in places other than England and the States.  We’ll see if I can settle on where that’s going and get it suitably polished.  It seemed relevant to my interests at the very least.

Words To Date: 18,133

March:

I received the second draft of a friend’s novel manuscript in the mail today.  I spent a good number of hours last year reading through her rough asking questions and making suggestions.  This one I got hard copy so I can mark it up to my little heart’s content.  I’m excited to be doing it, but I know I’m going to have to be more strict about what I do with my time through April and May so that I can get it all done.

In the meantime, the rest of March needs to be set aside for some serious word churning.  By ‘the rest of March’ I clearly mean ‘after the 18th when the Boyfriend is back at his home because he’s horrible for productivity’, but it doesn’t sound as snappy.  I’ll have twelve days to submit that poem and finish rough drafts of two short stories.  I feel kind of terrible for putting the Steampunk on hold, because I was chomping at the bit to get a final outline of it and it’s all I really want to write most of the time.  My one consolation there is that my co-writer is also busy writing other things, so I’m not really holding her up.

Now if only I could stop feeling like I was holding myself up.