December

Wow, December flew by in a flash! I've been neglecting my blog. Shame on me.

I received my copy of the anthology yesterday and I sat down and read every story. I needed a day of R&R so it arrived at precisely the right time. It felt wonderful to be holding a book in my hands that contained one of MY stories. I read Devil's Breath again, but it didn't feel like reading a story because I'm (obviously) too close to it. It's still too fresh in my writer's mind for me to have any perspective.

On Thursday, I received a very nice rejection letter from Story Quarterly. It's time to put "Not Your Average Joe" aside for a while - let Joe sit until I can look at him objectively and figure out why he didn't win anything more than finalist status in the Lunch Hour Stories contest.

This December, I enjoyed time with family and friends. I didn't hover over my keyboard. My ISP helped: we've had intermittent connectivity problems for months and in December we rarely had any internet access. But stepping away from my story was good for my family, for me, and for my characters. Guess what they did while I was making merry? They GREW! Isn't that amazing? I'm so proud of them. Now they're ready to pounce back onto the page.

The Last Day

I started this month with grand ambitions. I didn't meet my goal. At this stage, I could offer up excuses to myself but I won't because of the most important thing I did this month was make progress. I completed 10 chapters of my novel that need very little editing.

This has been a very full month:

• The first week of the month I submitted a short story to an anthology.
• Last week I submitted a short story to a contest.
• I spent a week with my mom.
• We got our long-awaited building permit for the addition to our home (yes, we put the cart before the horse)
• and somewhere in there was all that family stuff, like homeschooling lessons, attending classes, Thanksgiving, etc.

My son turns 13 tomorrow. Wow. Allow me to just stop and think about that for a minute....

Yeah, I can't get my mind around that concept, so, moving on...

I'm disappointed that I didn't get to "win" NaNo and cross that 50K finish line, especially having started off with so many words. But I'm also happy that I don't have another 50K+ word story that needs serious editing. NaNo is fun. It's a rush. But I already know I can produce enough words that, fully assembled, resembles a novel. The question is, can I write a novel-length story that will sell? I think I can, and I'm working hard to make Falling Short the best it can be.