Marching into March

Today is the first day of March, and I'm looking forward to this month. The possibility of snow is still there, but spring is right around the corner. Plus, my birthday is in one week, March 8. I'll be 28. I also am getting off four days (Friday-Monday), so it'll be a nice long weekend for me.

On the writing front, I want to look back on February. February's word count was 11,346. That's 4,302 words less than January, but I didn't work any on my novels in February, so that brought down the word count. The first two weeks were really difficult for me, since we had so much snow. I just couldn't get motivated to write at all. Other writing stats for February include:

Short stories written: 3 ("Grave Mistakes," "A Lesson Learned," and "The Golden Staff")

Submissions: 3 (one magazine, one writing contest, and one anthology)

Short listed: 2 ("Defying Gravity" and "The Golden Staff" were both short listed.)

Rejected: 0

Accepted: 0

February really wasn't a bad month, especially since I had those two stories short listed. March will bring up the rejections/acceptances, though, since I should find out about several stories in the next couple of weeks.

As for March, I have some March goals. For one, I really need to get back into my novels. I'm so far behind where I wanted to be by now in them. I would like to have five chapters in The Phoenix Prophetess edited/rewritten as well as five chapters in Virtuoso edited/rewritten. I want to write two chapters in The Phoenix Sorceress.

For short stories, I only have one short story that I want to write where the deadline is March 31, 2010. That short story is currently titled "Soul Drinker," and it is based off the Yanamamo tribe in South America. I want to write this story for The Way of the Wizard anthology. I had previously written a story ("Eclipe"), which was readily rejected, but I thought I would give it one more try.

In April, there are up to four places I want to submit to, so I might add one to two short stories in March to catch up. I plan to write "Magna's Plea" for Sword and Sorceress 25. It is a story that really is asking for me to write it, so I might go ahead, even though I can't submit it until after April 17th. "Magna's Plea" is based off my Kingdom of Amora in the Phoenix Trilogy that I'm working on.

The other anthology that I might go ahead and write for in March is A Halloween Whodunnit, published by Pill Hill Press. I plan to re-enter the world of Detective Liam O'Hare in a Halloween masquerade ball mystery. The current title for this short story is "The Harlequin's Last Laugh." Liam O'Hare is the detective in my short story "The Case of the Tom Cat," which was previously published, and is the featured detective in the book I'm slowly working on Moonlight Murders.

So, I have a lot I would like to accomplish for this month. We'll see if it happens. Wish me luck!