Yes, yes, I made the same joke over on my Patreon page, but still. It’s true! February was a good month for me overall (short story contest 2nd place is pretty nice, and the agent request was the icing on that cake, plus getting to restart the Writers Group… ooh, that reminds me, I have to submit something to that tonight… I should do that right now, please stand by).
Phew! Done. Anyway, all in all, a good month for me. I have high hopes for March… I want to get back to submitting short stories to publications, rather than just to contests (contests are great and all, but the publications are what build my reputation, help me gain an audience, and occasionally even pay! All important factors). That will also mean getting back in the habit of reading more short stories as well, to make sure I’m submitting the kind of work that the publications publish (ugh, that sentence…), I need to get this novel finished up and sent back to “my” agent (gosh I hope so!), and then I need to get the next novel edited up to at least a 2nd draft standard.
This is the tricky part, as those of you who follow the blog regularly will know. What I really want to do right now is produce more work… write more fiction, whether long or short, rather than refine that I have into a better form of itself. But that’s a dangerous slope to start going down… and it is far, far more important to polish and submit work than it is to generate an endless supply of unpolished stuff.
Anyhoo, it’s looking to be a very promising March. Always nice to have a little bit of optimism in the forecast… we will see what the next week or two brings!