Another month gone, another month half-over. So let’s go over what happened in March before I get any further behind!
Let’s take a look at what I had planned on doing, first, as usual. Red means NO, it did not happen, green means YES, it did happen, and yellow means it halfway happened, lol.
- Publish my first children’s picture book, Breakfast Time on the Farm! (SQQQQUUUEEEE!) (it went live March 28th, 2017!)
- Send goodies to my email lists!
- Update my Author Central page! (completed 3.7.17)
- Update front matter in all ebooks and reformat using Scrivener and Calibre. (I’ve been avoiding this. I don’t wanna!)
- Schedule promotions for Dreamers and Breakfast Time.
- Schedule Story Planning meeting with Wordwraiths. (But we did have a launch party for Kristin’s new thriller and did our usual weekly meet up!)
- Continue edits on Primus. (Yeah, about that … eh … we need to talk about that…)
- Deliver remaining Patreon rewards (live video chat, story prompt, behind the scenes video, naming characters).
A better month for the To Do … sort of. There are always so many other things that happen that I never plan on happening. But that’s life I suppose!
One of those unplanned things was my submission to this year’s Queer Sci Fi anthology flash fiction contest. I wrote a queer flash fiction of 299 words and submitted it April 6th. The deadline for submission was April 10th, so go me for turning mine in early! I’m very, very happy with my story, and I really hope the judges love it, too. My aim for this contest is simply to be selected for publication in their anthology for this year. I’m not necessarily hoping to place in the top three or be a Judge’s Choice, though if that happened, it’d be nice icing on the cake. 😉 We’ll see how that goes! I’ll let you know what happens with that!
The second thing that was semi-planned and semi-unplanned is that my novel Primus has been shelved for now. There is a very long story behind this that I’ll go into in a later post, but just know that after a lot of thought, I realized that was the best thing for that book at this point in time. While it’s simmering on the back burner for now, I’ve brought up the fantasy novel I had plotted last June. In March, I fleshed out my initial story graph and wrote about a paragraph summary for every chapter in the book. Yes. EVERY CHAPTER. Beginning to end, with no holes. This will be the first time I’ve ever planned a novel so extensively, and I’m very, very curious to find out how well that serves me while drafting. The main reason for doing this is because of what happened with Primus. Primus has largely been a hot mess, and it’s been like getting an octopus into a net to sort it all out, if you get my meaning.
I don’t want to go through that with another novel … ever. So. From now on, I’m going to try fully plotting and see how that goes.
And by “fully plotting”, I mean a paragraph summary of each chapter. Not a thousand word, bulleted outline of every single thing that happens. Plotting a novel is not equivalent to taking the “magic” out of writing, so don’t even go there. I’ve heard that protest so many times I’ve lost count, and it gets old. In no way whatsoever does plotting mean you will not be surprised by what ends up happening in your novel. I’m only on Chapter 4 of this new fantasy, and there’s already been about four unexpected things happen that weren’t in the initial plan. So calm yourselves, little darlings. Creativity in plotting is alive and well.
But I digress. That discussion is for it’s own post, as well.
So for now, that’s all for me! Things to do and people to see! ….
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