Well, guys, I somehow missed making my beginning of the month project update for February - by the time I realized this, I figured I might as well wait for March!
My goals for January were to "get my head back in the game" after Christmas, and to do better about sticking to my new schedule. I was very good about sticking to only writing "business" on Mondays - writing-related social media, researching places to submit, etc. Wednesdays and Fridays, without the distraction of "ooh, I wonder if anyone has clicked on my last post," I was able to get a good chunk of things done. Jason and I had a few occasions where we went out and did things on Wednesday or Friday nights and I was very good about making up the time I missed some other evening.
I also submitted two different stories over the past month and a half. That actually doesn't sound like much, but I've been more judicious about making sure the places I'm submitting to are good fits, looking for places that offer payment without also having to shell out a lot of money to enter a contest, etc.
I wrote a lot of new material for The Wolf and the Sheath in the first couple weeks of February - some of this was to go complete or transition between recent material that I wrote in November, and some of it was completely new. The main document now stands at over 60,000 words, and that's not including probably 10,000 words from the secondary document that I (mostly) wrote in November that still need to be copy/pasted in, and maybe 2,000-5,000 more little snippets in various other places.
But that was all before mid-February. The last thing I worked on that was writing related was to submit a story on Feb. 18. That was the night that we realized that Baldur was more than just "under the weather," and I have not had either the time or the emotional energy to work on anything since then. (For more on what's been going on with my boy, see my previous post: https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2019/2/24/baldurs-saga ).
As of the typing of this, we are still waiting on his biopsy results and I am just physically and emotionally exhausted.
But with that said, I have probably been more productive this February than last February. I don't remember getting a lot done early last February (for some reason last year, it took me a long time to get back into the swing of things after Christmas). Then, again in mid-February, we adopted Athena. The first month or so that we had her, she needed near-constant supervision and also had some separation anxiety, meaning that Jason and I pretty much alternated nights of who had a trembling doggy on their lap. (She has improved so much you guys, I can't even tell you.)
As of the 18th, my plans for March were to stay the course. I was starting to think I might actually be able to have a complete rough draft of Wolf and Sheath before Jason and I have our first (human) baby in August. But, depending on what happens with Baldur, I may dial back writing time in order to spend more time with him. There's a lot that is very much up in the air right now.
How is it that the shortest month always has so much crammed into it?