May has been a little bit hit and miss as far as getting the things done that I wanted to get done.
I’m actually OK with that. I’ve had a lot of months that were all miss and no hit, so this is actually an improvement.
What I did
I’ve been pretty faithful about keeping up with the reading for the 1000 Day MFA. I’ve taken a day off, here and there. Mostly, like, weekends–though I haven’t even taken every weekend off. I’m at the very beginning of this intentional plan to read more across more genres so I still have lots of time to fall off the wagon, but for now things are looking pretty good.
I haven’t kept up as well with the short story writing. I’ve written one story, and it’s one I need for a collection.
I really want to get back to that and use those stories to restart the weekly fiction posting I was doing on the blog for a while. Stories for the blog will always come second to stories that I intend for publication. But if I can get the juices flowing by writing and posting short pieces here, I believe it will help with my overall word output.
What’s on deck
June is going to get busy for me.
Here’s what I have planned (keeping in mind that by “planned” I mean “I intend to do these things but haven’t created any kind of firm schedule to actually get them done.”)
- The Water Collection (these are the stories I wrote for AtoZ in April)
- Write a few “bonus” stories (2 replacement stories–1 of which is done, plus 3-5 originals that have never been seen before)
- Polishing, editing, and proofreading
- Cover design and back cover/marketing copy
- Formatting and publication
- Advance planning and simple outlining for my July Camp NaNoWriMo project.
- Return to and complete the revision analysis of my Android story and decide if I’m going to try to revise or if I’d be better off completely redrafting the thing
That doesn’t look like much. On the other hand, it looks overwhelming. Gah!
Even though it looks like a lot of steps, I don’t think I’ll have any problem knocking out the Water collection–it’s the other stuff that has me worried. My biggest issues have always been with outlining and completing longer-format stories. Here I have one that’s begging to be completed, and another one waiting to be told.
I believe I can do it, but it’s going to take a lot of focus. Maybe I need to get brain glasses.