August yielded my highest word count yet, but the majority of it was my Fan Fiction Rewrites project, so I’m not ready to call that an unqualified triumph. The month itself was a bit topsy-turvy for me, anyway. As I write this, I’m very annoyingly not at Dragon Con, as I was too sick to go. I began last week with food poisoning and ended it with something that’s either a cold, fall allergies, or both.
In terms of things that got posted, the list is pretty short:
- All the Right Places (Star Trek: Voyager), an old, old piece that I had thought permanently lost until WalrusGirl (see below) was able to pull off a successful search with Google and the Wayback Machine. (I had previously tried two or three times, but without success.) In the end, I decided to leave it exactly as it was aside of fixing a few typos.
- Birthday Gift (Star Trek: Voyager), the second-to-last of the original batch of rewritten fan fiction items. I’d waffled for a long time before reposting this, as it’s pretty schmaltzy, but in the end decided to let it stand.
- Pilot Memories (Star Trek: Voyager, rated M), the follow-up to last month’s “Vulnerability,” which I had thought lost. The commenter nicknamed WalrusGirl left a positive note on “Vulnerability” and indicated she was glad to see it back up. During the ensuing conversation, I mentioned “Pilot Memories” and my lack of success with web searching. It turned out she had it in her personal archives. I’m thrilled to have been able to get this one back up!
I also got some more work done on Never But Maybe and began working on the final Fan Fiction Rewrite item (for now), called Limits. Ironically, “Limits” is the very first piece of fan fiction I ever wrote, in 1998-1999, although the version I’m reposting is a 2012-2013 revision.
In terms of new work? Very little of that got done. I got a few more items to the outline of All That Mattered. I began work on a piece of erotica that I’m writing under a separate pseudonym, which I’m referring to here as The Contract. I didn’t get any work done on The Perfect Daughter at all.
Going forward, though, I do have a nice list of things to work on, as well as some deadlines. I’ve been asked to put together a piece for an upcoming journal called Thistle and Moth. I know what I’m going to be writing, but I’m still trying to work out all the details — and it’s due October 4. I also owe The Perfect Daughter to the folks over at Two Squirrels Press by no later than the end of September. Finally, I have a narrative poem called, “The Tobacco People,” that I’m getting ready for submission to the Reedy Branch Review.
As Chris Baty of the now-defunct NaNoWriMo once observed, most writers work best on deadlines. I certainly have mine. Let’s see if I can manage to work against them during September. I hope so!