October Goals Round-Up

October has been a pretty good month for me, seeing not just my first story published but two of them!

I finally unearthed my problem with Written By The Stars and am going back to try and punch the plot in the gut and fix that(well, you know, after I’ve hit all my NaNo targets).

I finished off the first draft of The Glass Witch, which now totals at 14,000 words (I only wrote the last 6,500 this month though). I started a new flash fiction, but it died in the water when I realised it had no ending, it was just a great start.

I did a lot of NaNo prep, creating a detailed plot outline for the book (and looser ones for the two sequel books) as well as fleshing out the characters and creating a blurb and a one sentence summary. I’ve had a good start on it so far, but that’s to be covered in my November round-up ;p .

I did a lot of submissions this month, sending out reprint requests, putting in applications for awards and novelist retreats as well as the usual anthology and magazine submissions, but as is common with the submission process it will be a little while before I hear back from some of them.

It’s funny, sometimes I feel like I didn’t do much, because I didn’t write a lot new this month, but I did do a lot of final proofing, last checks before sending submissions, critiquing of other peoples work so really I was working quite hard toward my writing career as a whole. It makes me wonder if the ‘write every day’ rule for authors shouldn’t be tweaked slightly to be ‘make steps toward your writing goals every day’, because there’s so much more than just putting new words down on the page.

Now, lets see if I can survive my second NaNoWriMo. Also, here’s my jack-o-lantern in the dark!

A tip for other Aussies carving pumpkins: do it the night before Halloween, because the heat kills them within a few days, by Saturday evening mine was sagging and filled with mold!