Writing Updates and Goals

     I am happy that April is over.  I loved the A-Z challenge and am happy with my collection of children's stories.  I survived being the maid of honor at a wedding and traveling 12 hours each direction with my three children (leaving our lab/Great Dane puppy at the kennel was an awesome decision!).  Despite how well all these things went, I am drained.  I am ready for a new month.

    Last month my main goal was to avoid looking at the first draft of my novel "Awaken".  I succeeded, mostly, anyway.  After spending months immersed in it I found it hard to leave it alone.  I read all of  the Tiger's Curse books by Colleen Houck except for the last 50 pages of the final book.  Somehow the library here had a review copy of the book that was complete except for the final 50 pages...  How cruel is that?  I guess I will have to go to the downtown library and hope that they have the complete book.  I also read Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare and bits and pieces of books on revising.  I didn't do much writing other than my a-z stories.  I did start my next novel though! It deserves its own paragraph so more on that in a minute.

    My goals for May are:

• read 2 YA books
• plug away at the stack of review books that's staring at me
• begin revising "Awaken"
• finish plotting my new WIP (even though I've started writing it already...)
• write 2 short stories with the end goal being magazine submission

Knowing me, I will probably draft quite a bit on my new WIP, as well. 

   I made a post a while ago about following the muse.  I am so happy that I did!  My latest work in progress makes me smile every time I think about it.  I don't know if this will be it's final name but for now I am calling it "Simmer". 

Here is a line that may or may not be included in the book but I think it tells a lot about the tone of the book.

It was their way or die, or so they said. We looked around. The mainlanders were puppets. The islander’s were asleep, afraid to open their eyes to reality. We would settle for neither. We took to the sea.