2011 Goals Check-in: April

1. Finish at least one short story per month. Total completed: 1

I would have liked to say "3" instead, but the two other works-in-progress I was working on in April just didn't want to be completed that easily. :/

Not my most productive month in terms of writing, but I did get a few submissions sent out, and I did quite a bit of reading in April, including The Autobiography of Mark Twain, The Wise Man's Fear (finally!), and The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (eh). (For more on my recent reading, find me on Goodreads.)

The completed draft for April was a short folktale-type piece that I may not do anything with; we'll see after some time has passed.

2. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. Almost there. Since "Real Dragons Don't Wear Sweaters" wound up coming in over 10K words, its potential markets were few, so after getting the obligatory form rejections from those markets, I've decided to start off strong and make it my first Smashwords offering. Right now, the story is ready to go, and I'm working on commissioning the cover art. I have, at least, registered on Smashwords.com and gotten the story text formatted according to their guide, so the art is the main thing left to square away.

3. Open an Etsy shop. Still nothing on this one, though I'm starting to feel like fooling around with some ACEOs.

The other cool thing for April, of course, was Bewere the Night being released. If you haven't checked it out yet, you can find it on Amazon here and Goodreads here.

Something fun...

My flash fiction title "Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Meets the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is the co-winner of this year's Meager Puddle of Limelight Award for Best Short Story Title, hosted by jongibbs:

http://jongibbs.livejournal.com/186862.html

(Darn it, I knew I should have told my husband to go vote for me in the final round. Then it wouldn't have been a tie.) ;)

On a serious note, though, there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that I tied for first place without asking anybody outright to vote for me, even though it's possible I could have driven a few more voters to LJ to win outright. I'm just not crazy about doing the whole "hey guyz! go vote for me!!!" thing, even though I know it's not exactly frowned upon.

At any rate, both of us winners get a copy of Jon Gibbs' book Fur-Face (which I'd been wanting to read), a coffee mug that says "I are a writer" (sweet!), and either a guest blog post or an interview on his blog. Since I don't have any astounding ideas for blog posts at the moment, I'll be taking the interview option. Plus, interviews give me a satisfying illusion of importance. :)

(I really should make "Norma" into a series: "Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Finds the Lost City of Atlantis," "Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Meets Cthulhu"...)

Or not. :D