Good afternoon. We have snuck into May and it’s time for a quick reflection on what I achieved in April.
So I set out to finish the current draft of Black Blood, work on the two Penal Earth stories that I’ve got in the works, one video a week, work on mermaid story, and working everyday even if it’s just an hour.
It didn’t play out like that. I posted one video, didn’t work on either of the Penal Earth short stories. Mainly because when I looked at them I couldn’t see where to take them. But after finishing the Black Blood draft, and yes I finished it (happy dance!), I had this urge to work on something Penal Earth related.
I was going to wait until May to work on Penal Earth, but I just had this urge to crack on with it. I did not expect to get it done in the time I did, you know for me to edit 72218 words in about sixteen days is pretty good. I’m still trying to figure out how many words a month is a sensible goal to edit, but I also think it might be a case of instead of aiming for say 50k words edited a month, maybe go for edited four short stories a month. This way the goal is more project focused than numbers. I’m a writer, not a mathematical after all.
Both cats ‘helping’ me prep this post.
In April I completed two drafts. Both have been long term projects, especially Penal Earth. It’s nice seeing this project coming along. This last draft was mainly looking at the story, world building, and the characters. This next draft will be more focused on the actual writing and how I can improve it. I know I can’t write a lot of words, but it’s time for me to get my work out there more than I have and I want to step up a level and that includes sharpening the structure of the sentences and chapters etc.
I was thinking about writing my war child story for NaNoWriMo this year, but a mermaid short story I wrote years ago has pushed itself ahead of the war child story. I’ve been working on notes for it for a while, but this last month or so I’ve been delving into a lot of documentaries about the oceans and this has really sparked ideas for the mermaid story, and I don’t think it’s going to wait too long to be written. So I’ve been writing a lot of notes for it this last month, and it’s co I got along nicely.
I’ve also been working on notes for a story I’m calling ‘Gamer’, but this one is still in the very early days of development.
so, although I didn’t hit the goals I set out at the start of the month I’ve been productive and got stories that are progressing well.