March Writing Wrap-Up

March was an interesting month, writing-wise:

You can totally tell what days I was on strike and what days I was not. You can also spot the weekends, including the weekend that I didn't write anything because I was away in York at a weekend getaway with three other writers (which makes the fact that none of us wrote anything that weekend supremely amusing), and yesterday, the day before Easter, when we had friends visiting and spent the day sight-seeing, cooking, and watching a 3h15m version of Hamlet on TV.

You can also see not only when the strike ended but when term ended. I prioritised a few student-facing issues right after the strike ended, but after that, my priority was four papers due by April 6. The first needed only to be a draft, but was really too drafty in the state it was in; I got that one sent off on Monday. The second was tidying up loose ends of a paper that was originally due Feb. 15, and which my co-author and I had basically finished by then, but then the deadline was moved and the strike happened and we sent it to another friend for comments so nothing happened on it for a month and a half. I was quite surprised when we sat back down on Wednesday to look at it again just how close to finished it was; and it got sent off yesterday. The third was something I started just a few weeks before the strike and was ostensibly for a Mar 31 deadline; I didn't meet the deadline but should still be able to finish it up this coming week and I'll send it off anyway. The deadline was for the inaugural issue of a new journal; if I miss the first issue, there'll always be a second one. The fourth paper is an R&R that was originally due mid-March, but we received an extension on due to the strike. I'm co-writing it with the same person as the paper sent off yesterday, so we haven't had a chance to look at that one yet: But we're pretty confident we can do it during the four work days next week.

I still wish I had a slightly more regular fiction writing habit than I do, but I've made progress on a number of things, and have a couple of deadlines in April that I hope to meet. I find it useful to write stories for specific calls/topics/deadlines, but one consequence of this is that when the story is rejected, I then find it harder to pick another venue(s) for it, because it was so targeted. It's always a bit more dejecting to have a purpose-written story rejected, but I've pretty well managed to keep my turn around time between rejection and resubmission down to < 1 days, and keep 5 things in submission at a time (5 is all I've got finished/unpublished at the moment; working on trying to increase that number!)

I'm quite proud of the fact that I managed an average of just over 1k/day. I hope to keep that up in April as well. I'm participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, with a focus of finishing up my novella Base 8, which was mostly written in November NaNo but which needs some serious editing.

The last thing that makes me happy was how little admin I did this month. Whoo!