Welcome to this month’s update, albeit a tad late. March has been a busy thirty-one days, so let’s get right to it.
First, I did something I have thought about for a while – I joined a writer’s group. I was fortunate that my local library was starting up a new group, so I decided to give it a whirl. The first meeting was very loose and light, we established a few things that we would all like to accomplish during our time there, and we were given a prompt to work on until the next meeting. The prompt is the frustratingly vague “spring.” I still have not a single idea of what I want to do with that, but I have a few more weeks so hopefully something will come to me. The group itself is a potpourri of styles, goals, and accomplishments, and I had a wonderful time meeting them all. Hopefully this will become a steady source of feedback and inspiration.
Second, I was able to accomplish something rare: I finished an entire short story – a first draft of just a smidge over five thousand words – in a single weekend. The caveat is that I did plan out what I wanted to do with it in advance and I had the plot and most of the story details mapped out before I sat down, along with my rough dialogue pass. Still, to get the entire draft done in two days is an achievement of great rarity for me, and I pleased with how it turned out. It is in the hands of my trusty readers now, so hopefully I will be able to get this polished up and submitted for consideration by the end of April.
I stumbled upon that anthology in February, but it wasn’t until the beginning of March that I came up with a story I felt worked well. You can read more about the anthology here: Book of Choices. This story was fun for me, despite the light horror tone, for a couple of reasons. It echoes a lot of the shows and stories I enjoyed when I was younger, like Twilight Zone and “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs. And it also serves as a sort of penance for me personally. You see, when I was in college and working with an amazing and wonderfully talented group of people on a literary magazine. (There is a little bit about that group in this blog post.) I penned a short story titled “Ashes to Ashes.” And it sucks. I mean, it is just awful. It made an appearance in the magazine anyway. It was a few years later that I decided it was included more out of loyalty and pity than because of its merits (of which there are none). This new story is a vast improvement over that one, so even if they do not accept it, I feel like I have made up for that past transgression.
Finally, let’s check in on my goals for 2024:
1 – I want finish editing book one of my YA series to the point that I consider it good enough for publication (it probably won’t be, but I want to get it as far as I can take it). My second pass is progressing well but slowly; I want to really have it cleaned up before I show it to anyone else.
2 – I want to begin querying agents to see if I can publish that book, and its sequels, traditionally. I’m not there yet but accomplishing goal #1 must happen first.
3 – I want to finish the first draft of book 2 in that series and begin outlining book 3 with an aim at starting the writing process this year as well. I have gotten into a better rhythm with this now; I have 7 chapters done, I am still wrestling with the penultimate pieces of the middle act, and I have a lot of dialogue written out. So far I have drafted 7 chapters out of a planned 24.
4 – I want to have at least 2 short stories accepted for publication (not ones I submitted in 2023). I have the story I mentioned above almost ready to go out, and I am cleaning up another while searching for a potential home for Blade of Glass.
The month of March has swept by, and it’s needlessly feared Ides are behind us. Poor Caesar cast a curse upon a harmless date; the Ides of March simply means the first full moon of the month, and it was also considered the beginning of the new year and thus a day of celebration. But it was Julius Caesar himself who moved the new year from March to January only two years before his death, so perhaps there is something to the bad reputation that date holds. For me, it was the beginning of a writing weekend of great success, one I hope to replicate more frequently this month. Et tu April?