Sharp Words

It’s been a bit of a mixed month for me, as far as my writing goes.

I’ve completed four poems and written several bits of others. These include an unfinished sonnet which came to me during my drive home the other night, and which I recorded onto my MP3 player while driving – and I’m glad I did, else I would have lost it completely.

I revised an old poem and an even older short story, and entered them for competition – which was a new thing for me. Next, I want to finish up another short story or two, and pick out some poems to submit to magazines.

I wrote barely anything of the novel-in-progress:  a mere 378 words, most of which were done today! Although I did do some serious thinking about it, and made some plot and character notes. I’m reducing my goal for next month from 8,000 words to 5,000. That’s barely a weekend’s work in NaNoWriMo terms – if I can’t manage that, then I don’t deserve to be trying to write a novel.

I got a lot of lengthy, content-full blog posts written, including a trilogy for My love affair with poetry. I hit my goals of 2 book reviews and 2 Tech Writing Tuesday posts.

I was nominated for an Irish Blog Award – I don’t expect to make it even as far as the long list, never mind the short one, but it’s nice to have that logo up in my sidebar anyway. (Thanks Susan!)

All in all, I’m not dissatisfied with my writing progress this month. I’ve had frequent mad random bursts of creativity, and lots and lots of ideas. And importantly, I wrote most of them down for future use!

And as usual, if I hadn’t read so many novels, I might have done better…

So my main goal for February is going to be to keep up my momentum, and to make use of what I’ve written so far. I’m headed off home to Wales for a few days, from the middle of next week, so I might get some writing done while I’m away. We’ll have to see.