Friday Five for March 28th, 2014

1. Is March nearly done already? Wow. Time just flew past, and April's going to be a busy month outside the blogging world for me. I'll be slowing with my blog posts here and participating in the A to Z Challenge with Untethered Realms. We're featuring fantastical creatures. It's going to be a lot of fun!

2. I didn't get much done revision-wise this month. I had hoped to be halfway done with revisions for one of my WIPs, but my CPs and betas have been busy folks too. That's okay with me. I'm not forcing hard deadlines on myself this year. And I'm getting much more sleep because of it!

3. What have I been doing? I'm almost finished a new novella. I couldn't resist writing something new, and this is completely new for me. I found a call for themed novellas on a popular publisher site. One of them made me laugh. A lot. So I went for it, and the story flowed so easily. It's a geeky contemporary tale with absolutely no supernatural elements. Weird for me! And yes, I'm being mysterious about what it exactly is, because if the publisher rejects it, I love it so much I might self-publish it. Then you'll hear no end of it!

4. My son had his first literacy after school special this week. He blew the socks off the teacher. He's the best reader in his preschool by far. I'm so proud of my wonderful little guy.

5. No plans for the weekend. Maybe we'll finally watch Gravity. And the season finale of The Walking Dead. It's been an awesome season! Have a great weekend.

P.S. What do you think of my new blog banner?

Catching up on Sunday

It's been a busy week! The pumpkin patch was a lot of fun last weekend. My son's asking to go back. It's tempting since it doesn't cost anything to just hang out and visit with the animals.

I've loaded up L'il Gal Al and the Zombies of Amarillo to the various sites. It was much easier this time around. It's already up on Smashwords and Amazon. I'll be waiting until later this week to announce it officially when I have all the links. You guys get the early bird notice!

I've been working hard on my latest project. I'm halfway through the second novella of the series and I found the perfect covers. Good thing too, because I was wasting a lot of time fussing about covers. I had the perfect image in my mind, but of course, it was not to be found or made. I hope to tell you more about the series very soon.

Less than a month away from NaNoWriMo! I'm going to be writing a superhero story. I've already created general character outlines for the heroes and villains. My team of villains is magnificent! I favor them over the good guys. That does not bode well for my heroes!

My son has been loving preschool and I'm loving the time I get to write. I lose both my mornings this coming week, though. One is my scheduled day to be the assistant, and the other I volunteered to take because the teacher is going to be away on vacation. I took Jack (my laptop) to the library on Thursday morning. Libraries aren't quiet places any more. There were at least six men in suits with their laptops and phones doing business. Individually. Offices too expensive these days? I was more productive sitting in the car writing.

The Walking Dead premieres tonight! It's a zombie kind of month.

NaNoWriMo 2011 - day 6

Word count: 14050

I'm ahead of schedule and having fun. It's been a busy weekend and I haven't gotten a chance to write as much as I wanted, but I did more than the minimum daily word count.

My story is growing into something darker and deeper than I imagined. It's going to be a long one too. I'm predicting 100,000 words. Though possibly 20,000 will be deleted in the editing process. As I said before, there's lots of dialogue.

I've seen a couple of people that have already made the 50,000 word mark. Wow. You guys are writing machines. And at least one of you is a parent! You're all amazing. For the rest of you, keep writing. You can do it!

I'm tired tonight. I didn't get an extra hour of sleep last night with the time change. We kept our son up an hour later, but he was still up at an early hour. I'm going to curl up on the couch with some ice cream and watch The Walking Dead. Have a good Sunday night!

Oh! And since I missed Snapshot Saturday yesterday, here's a picture of my backyard. The Japanese Maple is bright red and losing its leaves. I love all autumn colors even though I'll have to rake them up eventually.