In the interest of trying to post something monthly, here’s a March recap. Possibly some February thrown in too, but I honestly don’t remember where I put February. It’s just gone.

Neither month was particularly productive, writing-wise. I wrote one short story for Uncanny’s call for Dinosaur submissions, and it was promptly rejected. It’s okay, because I was really using it as an excuse to explore some new characters for what could become a novel, so it wasn’t a complete exercise in futility.

Much of the end of February and beginning of March was spent on a birthday shawl for my mom:

I’m calling this one Dandelion Wine. Here is your periodic reminder that if you have not read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine you are missing out.

The pattern is called Golden Apples of the Sun, and I bought it at Rhinebeck (NYS Sheep and Wool Festival) a few years ago and finally got around to knitting it. Actually, I’ve tried a few times, and I finally got my head around how the pattern worked. Sometimes it takes a few tries, because spatial recognition is not my strong suit. I will never be an architect.

On the reading front, I’m literally in the middle of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and thoroughly enjoying it. I also really liked the three available books in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. The most recent one, Beneath the Sugar Sky, is my favorite.

I don’t have a short story spotlight this time, because I typically read those on my lunch breaks at work and it is tax season, so I have not seen an uninterrupted lunch break in weeks. That means I mostly play a silly game on my phone for a few minutes instead of getting involved in a story.

Next up: It’s April, and that means it’s CampNaNo time. I’ve set myself what I feel like is a perfectly realistic goal of 30,000 words for the month, and as of right now, I’m on track. Hooray. I’m working on two things– a rewrite of an old novel with an entirely new plot, and a first draft of a new thing that involved the characters from the dinosaur story. Now that I’m thinking about it, I may as well send out the dinosaur story again and see if I can get any bites.

I also have a couple bloggy ideas kicking around on a back burner in my brain, but I’m not going to say anything at this point in case I don’t follow through, since I have a few other deadlines coming up and I should focus on those.

Happy spring! (It’s still snowing in New York, but we can dream, right?)