Trials and Tribulations

March has not been the most productive month around here. We’ve had the car accident, spring break, and now other responsibilities are creeping in.

Here’s what I’ve done the last several days instead of writing:

• I went to a several hour long meeting for a local Scottish festival, of which I am a council member and also in charge of the FB page and setting up an email list (and then I sent emails and messages and updated things accordingly)
• (The festival is in two and a half weeks, so)
• There’s a big children’s consignment sale twice a year at which I am very slowly offloading things the small, mobile ones have gotten too big for. It is in a week. I am not as far along in being ready as I should be due to surgery, car accidents, etc.
• (I have run out of hangers so that is an issue, but luckily one that is easily fixed.)
• It is the Scholastic Book Fair at the bigger, mobile one’s school, and I am volunteering, both because I am behind on my volunteer hours for the year (we’re supposed to do 30 hours, ahahahaha) and because I love both books and book fairs.
• (I spent $35 on books while there yesterday, but in my defense only one is for me.)
• (It is City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab.)
• We did go on an overnight trip for spring break to a new, local, giant resort hotel that’s running a special deal for locals. That was nice.
• I went to a webinar yesterday about creating classes on Skillshare. I had this revelation last week that it didn’t make sense to have a nonfiction series that wasn’t driving people to something, and I’m not sure if I mentioned that I wanted to get out of freelance editing (it takes up the brain power I need to work on my own stuff), but it doesn’t make sense to drive people there if I’m phasing that out. (The self-publishing coaching and book formatting aspects are fine. Ugh, I probably need to change my URL or something.) The Skillshare webinar came to my attention immediately after having this revelation, so there may be something to that.
• (That being said, if you were going to take a class on a particular aspect of writing, what would it be?)

Plus we’re hosting a den meeting at the house tonight so I have to clean everything, bleeeehhhhh.

I think I’m just going to have to accept that my March goals are going to remain sadly unfinished and just roll the lot of them over into April. I can probably manage a few things around festival/book fair/consignment selling, though:

• I would like to at least finish Lesson 9 of my writing class. That will give me an outline for the story I’m working on there, which means there SHOULD be writing in the near future, and I’m always up for writing.
• I would like to finish the Story Ideas workbook (currently 24 pages long), the freebie to go along with it, and edit the common writing mistakes book. That might not all get done–I need to finish the story ideas before going on to the next book, and the workbook is taking longer than expected, though I hope once I get through the individual exercises that it will move faster.
• maaaaaybe a drabble of some sort? WriYe is having a WriDay on Friday, but the lowest word count section is 2500 words, and my drabbles only run ~1000. (I don’t think it can go much longer and still be a drabble, honestly.) If I’m on to revising the next nonfic book, it might be doable, because I’m adding new sections as I work on those.
• Finish the complete draft (with drawings) of the first Landsquid picture book and continue my research into the wild world of children book publishing. I’ve gotten the 2019 Childrens’ Market out of my library, which I am very slowly making it through.
• Finish reading 1, but preferably 2 (or maybe 3!) books.

How’s your March going, Squiders?