March Doings

Another month draws to a close, and spring is supposedly here . . . even if it doesn't always feel very springy. Anyway. Onto the Doings!

Writing!

• I spent the whole month in another long-term word war with friends at Whitehall, much like I did in February. Once again, I didn't win, but I was neck-and-neck with the person who won in February for most of the month. Then I burned out after a 4K weekend and a certain amount of stress from another life event and fell behind by a lot. 
• Part of why I was able to keep up was that we agreed to include editing and rewrites in the contest, so I was able to work on editing Destinies and Decisions. I'm up to chapter twenty-something and pretty happy with how it's going- though I'm also ready to take a mostly-break from editing next month. 
• Also, in the continuing saga of my adventures in yWriter: I am mildly annoyed by the fact that there's no autocorrect for spelling mistakes like in Word, but there is automatic capitalization (often at inconvenient times). Also, there's no tab function. However, the ability to change the order of scenes and chapters and such without a massive amount of copy-pasting is splendid, so overall I'm very happy I made the switch. (There has been a lot of chapter rearranging, let me tell you. Thus why the notebook containing my first draft also contains a half-dozen bookmarks so I know where different sections begin and end and can switch around as necessary.)
• I did manage to write a bit of flash-fiction and such over the course of the month as well. Hopefully I'll post some of it. We'll see.

Reading!

• I started out the month right with Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson. Which was amazing and awesome and a whole lot of wow. Steris is practically on level with Wax for favorite-character-dom. And there were revelations and answers and more questions and kandra being creepy-weird-but-good (in one case) and hilarious (in another case) and a whole lot of awesome.
• I also finished out my grand Sanderson reread with the Mistborn trilogy. This was partially because I felt like I had forgotten things, and partially because a Mistborn plot stared up on the Cosmere Roleplay I mentioned back in January and I needed to do research. It was mostly just as good the second time around- though the second book seemed to suffer the most.
• In addition, I finally read Storyworld First . . . and wasn't as thrilled with it as I expected. Most of the reason was that I expected more worksheets and exercises (similar to Writing Magic) and there weren't really any in there.
• I did some other reading and rereading in there as well . . . but the real highlights of the month, other than Bands of Mourning, were Songkeeper, which I'll be reviewing here on the blog sometime in the next week or two (depending how stuff works out), and Scholar's Plot, which I finally caved on and bought on Kindle because it's ridiculously expensive in paperback. Both books were well worth the wait I'd had for them.
• And speaking of waiting . . . Calamity is in, after a great deal of dithering on the part of my library! (If this happens with the next Sanderson book to come out as well, I'm going to start suspecting a conspiracy against me.) Hopefully, as with BoM last month, I'll be reading it by the time you read this. Though I may wait until Saturday, depending on how much I have to do today.

Life!

• I'm currently doing a dual-enrollment course on the Old Testament via my college-of-choice. So far, I'm really enjoying it a lot more than I did the last dual-enrollment course I took. The professor is great and the material is really interesting- even the lesson on Leviticus was enjoyable, which says quite a bit. (I might or might not end up making a blog post at some point about what I'm learning . . . probably not, because I'm not sure who'd actually be interested in reading it, but maybe sometime.)
• My family traveled down to Virginia for Easter, which was really fun. We got to celebrate a friend's birthday while we were down there, besides enjoying our traditional Easter brunch potluck. I also did a lot of reading in the car- a Songkeeper Chronicles book and a Discworld book each way. So, that was an all-around excellent weekend.
• Does anyone else feel like YouTube has been really, really slow lately? Like, there are times when the videos just won't load at all, and you just get that little "loading circle" going around and around into infinity? Or is this just me? It's rather annoying, since some of the videos for my dual-enrollment class are on YouTube and then they won't load and I have to go back and watch them later.

April Plans!

• Camp NaNoWriMo is here! (Or, just about.) I made a post on this earlier in the month, if you remember, and was debating about what to write. I've settled on Mechanical Heart, the dark-steampunk Rapunzel retelling, and will probably try to get a few chapters edited over the course of the month as well. 
• On that note, if you're doing Camp NaNoWrimo and you're looking for a cabin to join, please let me know! My friends and I would be happy to have you join us!
• Also on that note, no post tomorrow. Because, you know, Camp NaNoWriMo. That and I'll probably be hiding from the internet to some degree. (Either that or laughing as the chaos from other peoples' pranks goes by . . . either's possible.)
• It's probably a good think I'm only going for 20K this April because I have Calamity (as previously mentioned), Mistborn: Secret History, Lady's Pursuit, The Great Hunt, and The Raven Boys to read (among a great many other books).
• And, as usual, there's school stuff. And attempting-to-earn-money stuff. The school, at this point, is mostly fun. (I already mentioned the Old Testament class, and the others are almost as enjoyable.) The attempting-to-get-money is somewhat less so.
• So, basically, April is going to be busy, but in the good way. Not in the crazy "I'm doing a lot of work, and I'm exhausted, and I have next to no time to read or write" way. I'm ok with that.

 What have you been up to this month? What are your plans for April? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)