Skunk better, Ostara, Writing stats

Hobkin continues to respond well to his meds. His symptoms appear to have cleared up and he’s eating well. And even his stripe is back on straight. Thanks to everyone who sent their concern and well wishes!

Matthew and I had our celebration of Ostara yesterday. We made apple ‘n parsnip soup, beer bread, and “pooka” cookies. Actually the pooka cookies were these ready-to-bake sugar cookies with pink bunnies on them, ostensibly for Easter. But they looked more like pooka cookies to us. Much yumminess.

Writing stats:

Sold reprint of “Inspirations End” to Scrybe Press! Huzzah! Now I’m very glad I asked the editor of Tales of the Paranormal not to publish it on her website.

And a bit on the worrisome side, some of my emails seem to have disappeared into a black abyss. Damn Internet gremlins!

Twelve critiques so far on the current story up at Critters. It’s getting a very positive reception.

4900 words yesterday on the novella. It’s officially a novella now and it’s done! That might be a daily productivity record for me. Actually, this whole last week might be a productivity record for me. I noticed it felt easier to crank out higher word countage per day as I went along.

“Done” is probably too optimistic a word, though. The prose is rough. It’s going to take several more passes before I even want to show it to Matthew. But rewriting and editing is easy, comparatively. I’m jazzed to have completed a work of this length. It’s the longest project I’ve managed to finish, and it gives me hope that I might actually be able to do longer lengths after all.

This whole “skip scenes you get stuck on” strategy has really worked out. I did end up tossing a couple scenes I wrote out of order because when I went back to the earlier part, the storyline didn’t end up going where I thought it would. But considering I typically ditch whole paragraphs and scenes in the course of my normal rewriting, even when I’m going chronologically, I pretty much accept that as how my writing process works.

Using standard manuscript count, it comes to approximately 24,000 words. Wow.