WIP of the Month: March-ing On!

C'est Fini!!!

Well, friends, I have done it! February, in spite of being the shortest month, was a rousing success! I finished my Wattpad-exclusive story, "The Water-Man", with a week to spare, and that left me free and clear to take a little "get caught up on reading library books" break before starting into my next WIP-of-the-month!

And I must say, what a relief it is. The characters all cooperated with what they should be doing in the story, I was able to take the time to get things set up in conversation, rather than having to shoe-horn some on-the-nose exposition to get everybody into position and where they needed to be, along with what they needed to say.

Reading it aloud to my writing buddy was an excellent opportunity to test if I had written well. Especially when the way I wrote garnered a reaction in all the right places. Tugging at the heartstrings of a particular Wattpad reader gave me great joy. Most of all, I am glad to finally be able to draw the two parts of the story together. For so long, it had to be two separate parts, and they seemed to be completely unrelated—but all the hemming and hawing I went through over Mollie and her descent into murderous madness was worth it when I figured out how exactly to bring the final mystery to light without being too obvious or requiring anybody to act out-of-character just for this one scene.

Now it is over, I can chalk that up to a successful attempt and use it as motivation to fuel many more successes in the months to come!

What's Upcoming for March?

Writing

March's little WIP! A mock cover I designed myself; Isn't it pretty??

 

This month, it's going to be a short story I am writing for a tribute anthology in honor of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. The story I am writing is called "The Starborn Legacy", and it's sort of a combination "love child" of two stories I wrote for my NaNo project of 2013—the one based on my first-ever attempt at the Suggestion Box series. 

The basic plot came from the story "The Legacy", about a mother who grew up feeling abandoned by her own mother, a famous explorer, so she reacts by doting on her own daughter. The daughter discovers a secret that the grandmother left behind, and the two of them finally work things out to be able to follow the clues to a discovery the grandmother had saved for her descendants to find. 

Since this is more of a sci-fi/fantasy theme, though—I thought I might borrow from the setting and the concepts used in "The Vega Effect", except without the creepy, horror-like ending. 

Hence the mother and daughter live comfortably in a colony on the other side of the galaxy, and the scorned grandmother is a famous terraformer and galactic explorer. Much of the story is going to follow "The Legacy"... except one key event that is central to the plot, a device lifted straight from "The Vega Effect," with dire consequences for many characters. You'll have to wait and see... or meanwhile, read those two stories on Wattpad (if you like; the blog posts linked above are merely excerpts, not the complete story) for a bit of an inkling as to what might happen! 

Possibly the biggest challenge for this project ISN'T that it's going to drag on and on till I burn out... but that I am going to have to work at keeping the story under eight thousand words. Considering "The Legacy" itself was just over ten thousand... I've got my work cut out for me! The good news is that it shouldn't take me very long to write, and then I can get it beta-read and polished before submitting it in April!

In addition to that story, I am also working at making progress on The Clan of Outcasts! After delaying it a week because of lack of input, a small group of reader-friends I'm in on Facebook came through this week, and I got enough character nominations to put together a plan for a new episode coming on Saturday! (I also tried making a poll here on GooglePlus, but that didn't go over so well...) All that to say--If you really like the Clan of Outcasts, literally the only way I can keep it going is if you comment on a post or somehow let me know that you would like to nominate certain characters! I think I'm going to stick with doing it bi-weekly, since it usually takes about a week to get people to nominate characters. It's not restricted to only one character, and it's not limited to just one day, either. I'm going to keep it wide open and guideline-free until it gets so far out of hand that I have to create parameters and stipulations--but right now, I'm getting so few responses that there is really no need! The more nominations I get, the more I can do with (and to!) these characters! Don't hesitate, nominate!

Reading

 

My goal is still to read at least 2 indie books and feature their reviews this month! I'm about halfway through the first book, A Spell in the Country by Morgan Smith--and it's getting pretty exciting, so it shouldn't be long till I've finished that one!

Meanwhile, I've finally pulled my new books off the shelf (Clouds of Witnesses by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Name of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss) and started reading! I have so many ebooks to read, it's going to be a looong time before I find myself in a library again, I think. 

Not only indie ebooks, but there is also a lot of Wattpad reading to catch up on! I start following authors whose stories sound really cool... and then I never quite get around to reading the works of these authors I'm following. No more! I am just going to keep plugging away till I've covered them all!

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So that's what I'm up to this month! How about you? What are you reading or writing? Do you have any other goals that you've set this month? Tell me about them!

 

Catch You Further Upstream!