I spent most of March being lazy, barely getting any writing done. I didn’t write a short story, when I want to write one each month. I think I spent much of spent my writing time grappling with Chapter 10 of The Bone Queen, which has now been divided into two chapters, but still isn’t done.

This is all fine, if I want to miss my goals for this year.

If I actually want a finished novel by the end of the year, ready to start submitting to agents, if I want 12 new stories (one of which will hopefully sell to a pro market), if I want finished first drafts of two other novels, then I need to pull my thumb out and actually write. The words won’t appear on the page no matter how much I browse the internet and wish my wordcount was higher.

To which end, I am going to use this blog to hold my production accountable to myself, and to anyone reading who cares to encourage/insult me if I don’t do the work.

My targets aren’t entirely precise, given that I’m rewriting The Bone Queen rather than working on first draft, and it’s hard to tally up editing. 500 is my daily word target if I’m working on new material. It’s a bit less exact for editing. But if I haven’t done something useful with my day -- with the exception of days where I’ve been having a social life, or if something unavoidable like illness crops up -- then I’ll be annoyed with myself. Useful can also include writing reviews or critiquing other people’s work.

I’ll post weekly summaries of what I’ve done. I’ll be completely honest. If my week has been full of fail, feel free to insult/encourage me. If my week has been a success, make sweet internet-love to me then I'll be happy. I’m hoping that by being openly accountable, I’ll feel bad if I don’t have something to show for myself.

Because I don’t want to spend each day slogging through my day job and then browsing the internet when I get home. That’s not how I want my life to go. I want to have done something by the end of the year, other than accumulate a stack of books from amazon and get sore eyes from looking at the internet too much.

Yesterday was a good start:
- 559 words on Ch11 + editing pass through “SA,P,N,R.”

Now I need to continue that productivity throughout April, May and the rest of the year after that.

Tags: mush mush mush
Mood: determined

My evening so far has been very good, for two reasons:

1.


2.  Chocolate cupcakes with a hint of cardamom, which is a highly delicious combination.

But mostly it's the contributor copies for Sybil's Garage 5.  =DD

I've loved Sybil's Garage ever since I first found my way to their website, sometime back in 2006.  I tried submitting to them a few times, but with no success, until they picked up "Tattoos of the Sky, Tattoos of the Days" for issue 5.  Which made me rather excited. 

And now issue 5 is alive and flapping in the world!  With contributions from jlundberg (Jason Erik Lundberg), tithenai (Amal El-Mohtar), vylar_kaftan (Vylar Kaftan), samhenderson (Samantha Henderson), ajodasso (Adrienne J. Odasso) and many more, as well my story, there's plenty to entice and delight.  Go now.

"Sybil's Garage 5 is...  A spectrum of stories and poems from the past, present and elsewhen.  It is intergalactic love ballads, evil supermarkets, the bad girls of myth, and nostalgia for things that never were."

(And, if that's not enough goodness, the Paper Cities anthology edited by Ekaterina Sedia has also been released.)

Tags: short fiction