April was a planned “rest and reset” month after going full-speed through January, February, and March to finish All That Mattered. At the beginning of the month, it actually took me several days to downshift out of that mode, but by mid-April I had done what I intended. Even with that, though, my word count of 19,602 was more than the monthly goal, so I’m still well on track toward my annual goal.
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I finished posting All That Mattered on April 12 after finishing its first-pass developmental edit and deciding there was no need to keep things to one chapter a day once that was done. It has not gotten quite the same intensity of reaction as Standing in the Dark. That was predictable: this was a more ensemble-based piece (as opposed to strictly focusing on Lee/Amanda) and the “casefic” part drove a significant part of the plot. But knowing that it was coming didn’t make it any less disappointing when I actually got there, and the reviews I did get were positive.
In retrospect, I probably would have benefited from letting it “bake” for a little while after I finished the first draft. There were plenty of opportunities for Lee/Amanda scenes that I skipped over in order to stick to the outline, and that’s a downfall I’ve faced before. Giving it some extra time probably would have led me to add some more of that in. The problem, of course, is that I hate having to make major retroactive changes in second and third drafts — even when they need them. So I’m chalking it up to a lesson learned and the identification of a problem I need to figure out.
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Since my mind was still in Scarecrow and Mrs. King territory, I ended up going ahead and finishing the chapter-level draft of A New Horizon, which will be the third volume of the Restless Hearts series. This story has been intended, all along, to be more Lee/Amanda focused, and after the first pass on this outline I can see that it’ll have both a slower pace and less of a focus on the casefic aspect (although that will certainly be there).
Out of sheer excitement, I also ended up doing the scene-level outline for Act 1 of 4, and I was sorely tempted to just go ahead and begin writing. But the entire point of a “rest and reset” month is to keep myself from burning out, so I (barely) managed to resist the temptation. The fact that I was in California on a business trip during the week of April 20th helped a lot.
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I also wrote two more vignettes for my fan fiction series No Choice But Forward (also in the Scarecrow and Mrs. King universe): Quiet Enough and The Day After.
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After coming up completely dry on topics and words, I decided to shut down the blog posting for a while. However, toward the end of the month I resurrected one aspect of the blogging, so it seems I’m not completely done with that; rather, I’m just significantly dialed down for a while.
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The planned activity for the month of April was prewriting for Headwaters, but I found myself making excuse after excuse for avoiding that. Despite myself, though, I got the outline re-worked and ready to go. I’m still not quite sure what’s going on with that, but I’m not going to let my restlessness-or-whatever get in the way of doing the job. Sometimes the hardest part of anything is just showing up, and I figure that’s all that’s going on here.
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The weekend after the trip to California — which was simultaneously amazing and exhausting — I took part in one of Signum SPACE’s occasional writing intensives. To my surprise, I ended up working on The Perfect Daughter and getting some fairly extensive writing done on it. It wasn’t enough to completely fire me up again, but the story is beginning to take shape and I do believe I’m going to end up finishing it before too terribly much longer. Or, at least, I hope so.
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Finally, last but likely not least, I had a very short poem come out after bubbling in the back of my brain for a few weeks. I got it down, and it actually seems to be in good shape although I don’t yet have a title. But I’ve gone back to it a few times already, and I think it’s likely to get submitted for Volume 9 of the Reedy Branch Review.
Speaking of the Reedy Branch Review, as promised, Volume 8 came out on May 1st — and I’m right there on page 77. I initially thought there was a missing line break in the first stanza of “The Tobacco People,” but on second look it turned out that was just an artifact of the first few lines’ length themselves. There, more than anywhere else, the poem’s origin as a series of sentences comes through. But I’m still thrilled to see my work in print again!
Even more exciting, it looks like they’re going to start evaluating some of the work in RBR for Pushcart Prize nominations. While I doubt I’ll be selected for submission on my first outing, it’s still something I can be hopeful about — and something I can strive toward.
In May, I’m planning to try and get back onto my regular rhythm of roughly one scene per day, except this time with Headwaters. We’ll see how it goes.