February Doings

First off, happy Leap Day! I don't know if anyone actually does anything for Leap Day . . . but if you do, tell me in the comments. (I, personally, will be enjoying an extra day of reading. Hopefully.) Anyway, onto the doings of this month!

Writing!

• The entirety of the month was spent in a long-term word war with some friends at Whitehall, which helped a lot with motivation. I didn't win- the person who did win left me behind midway through the month and I never caught up- but I'm still happy with how I did. Why? Well . . .
• I finished Monster in the Castle! Two years and just-under-ten-months of (on-and-off) work and it's finally done! Or . . . drafting it is, for clarification. It still needs a lot of editing, but that'll wait. I ended up writing the climax and denouement in about grand and glorious days heavy with inspiration. Overall, I'm actually really happy with how it turned out.
• Non-spoilery snippet from the climax (well, non-spoilery considering what the story is based on):

"Queen du Karel's expression tightened. 'Servant's work? Do you intend to make a mockery of your betrothed, Lord Aethan?'
'No more than you plan to make a mockery of my country, your majesty,' Aethan replied, with a diplomat's smile. 'In any case, any lady of Aldurna, even the queen herself, could perform this task. Surely the princess is capable as well.'"

• I really thought I'd be burned out on this world and characters by now- that after I finished Monster, I'd want to give up on these fairy tale retellings for a year or two. But, amazingly, I'm not. I have ideas for two or three more novels in my head, and while I'm not sure when I'll write them, I do want it to be (relatively) soon. 
• However, at the moment I have no WIP (which is a really weird feeling . . .) and instead I'm hoping to focus on editing and short stories. Oh, and worldbuilding. Storyworld First awaits!
• Amazingly, I did get a respectable amount of editing done this month, despite all the writing. I'm up to chapter eight of Destinies and Decisions, so huzzah! I also figured out how to use yWriter . . . ish. It works much better once you have the tedium of making characters and all that set-up stuff. And it works quite well for when you want to work ahead (as long as you know roughly how many chapters are going to be in between what you're working on and what you've already done) or if you need to switch around the order of chapters . . . which is something I've had to do a bit.   

Reading!

• You know how I said I only read 12 books last month? I read even fewer this month: 10 total, and one of them was more of a short story. However, considering how much writing I did, I'm not really surprised.
• The reading highlights of the month, at least at the time I'm writing this, were Stars Above (the Lunar Chronicles anthology, which was wonderful and provided a very nice closure to the series . . . even if all my predictions about the wedding of the century were wrong!) and The Eye of the World (which was probably as long as any of the Stormlight Archive and rather slower . . . but still very good).
• I mentioned last month that I was hoping to reread the Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy- which I succeeded in doing! I liked some bits more than the first time and some bits less . . . but I'd forgotten a lot of what happened, so it was almost like reading them for the first time, except I had a bit of warning of certain especially-memorable bits.
• I also enjoyed The Screaming Staircase and The Dagger in the Desk, both of which were deliciously creepy and a bit Jackaby-esque, though not quite as much as I'd been hoping. I have the next two books in the series waiting in my room, but I haven't read them yet, because . . .
• I finally have Bands of Mourning! At the time I write this, I haven't actually read it yet, because shortly before the previously-mentioned three grand and glorious days of writing, I put a personal ban on reading any and all Sanderson until I finished my novel. However, since I didn't actually pick up BoM until Friday, I first reread Warbreaker and Elantris, both of which I already had out. There are, by the way, some rather striking similarities between the two novels. I'm not sure which of the two is better, though. And, since I finished Elantris yesterday, I'll hopefully be reading Bands of Mourning by the time you see this post! At last!

 Life!

• My family celebrated Valentine's Day with peppermint patty brownies and our usual half-dipped heart cookies. Well, the brownies might not have been for Valentine's Day, per se, but they were close to it. The point is, both brownies and cookies were delicious, and they would've been the outside-of-reading-and-writing highlight of the month, if not for . . .
• Sunshine! Glorious, beautiful sunshine! I mean, we had snow (not a ton, but enough), and we had miserably cold temperatures, and we had weeks of clouds. But the better part of the last week has been sunshine and fairly warm temperatures- all but one of the bad days wouldn't have been unreasonable for a Virginia February; the better days felt more like spring- so thank God! I even went for a walk yesterday, that's how nice it was. Of course, it's supposed to snow tomorrow . . . but that's tomorrow.
• I promise that I won't talk about the weather in every Doings post. Only when there's something exceptional that happened. 
• I am, by the way, getting really tired of hearing and seeing the Allegiant trailer on YouTube. I know it hasn't been out for terribly long (or I don't think it has?) . . . but I feel like I've heard it way too often.
• Last week was just a really good week in general, ok? There was lots of writing, there was rereading-of-Sanderson, there was lovely weather, and calculus didn't kill me. 

March Plans!

• I'm going to do a lot of editing, much of it on Destinies and Decisions, but I'm hoping to get back to Between Two Worlds some as well. I'm still not quite sure how I'm going to balance them . . . depending how Destinies and Decisions goes, I may try to switch back and forth between them, or I might just work on Destinies until I get stuck and then go back to BTW for a while.
• As mentioned previously, I'm also going to be trying to do some short story writing (mostly one-shots) and worldbuilding. I may or may not end up requesting prompts on here for one-shots . . . my plot bunnies have an annoying habit of hiding whenever I'm actually looking for them. And, of course, I do need to be thinking about Camp NaNoWriMo in April . . .
• Tomorrow is the announcement of the winners of teh Five Magic Spindles contest hosted by Rooglewood Press! I'm a bit nervous (to put it lightly) since this is my first year entering and I have no idea how much chance I have . . . And if you happen to notice me squealing, yelling, dying, or otherwise being somewhat-incoherently excited on forums or Goodreads tomorrow, it's either the contest or Bands of Mourning. Or both. I'm really hoping for both.

How was your February? What plans do you have for March? Are you celebrating Leap Day? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)  

January Doings

So I decided that I ought to try doing a monthly recap sort of post, much like Deborah O'Carroll's Monthly Ish-ness posts and Katie Grace's Monthly Highlights. This is partially so I have something else to blog about, partially so I can lump all the little things that (I think) happen that I find interesting but not worth blogging about on their own into one larger post, and partially so that in six or so months, when I'm wondering "What the thrice-baked pumpernickel did I do in January? Did that month even actually exist?" I can look back and have this post as a reference. (And also as an assurance that the month did, indeed, happen. Logically, I know that all months and days and such must have existed, but sometimes they all just blur together so that some bits and pieces of time feel as if they didn't actually happen and it's rather disorienting.)

Anyway. Doings!

Writing!

•  On January 4th, I finished writing Binding Destiny! I'm happier about that than I have a right to be- comparatively speaking, I wasn't working on it for long, only a bit over two months. However, I was also a bit tired of it, mostly because I pushed myself so hard during NaNoWriMo and it just didn't turn out like I expected. But I'm still fairly happy with it, all things considered.
• I did not finish Monster in the Castle. But I did finish a sixth notebook's worth of first draft (I'm fairly certain that the size of this novel is a bigger monster than the titular one . . .) and I'm rapidly approaching the climax, so we're good. And I get to write about the Princess du Karel, who changed about a year ago from being a rather cliche and useless sort of sub-villain to one of my favorite characters in the novel (after the protagonists and Jason Silver- and, honestly, she might be on par with the heroine). Can you tell that I'm excited?
• For those wondering: yes, I did solve the dilemma I mentioned before NaNoWriMo concerning the shirt-washing situation. Many thanks to Meredith and Elethia for their suggestions!
• I'm trying to edit Destinies and Decisions. It's going . . . slowly. My wordcount spreadsheet says I edited 5,038 words this month, which isn't very much. Part of it's because I'm procrastinating; part of it's because I'm having to shift a lot of scenes around and completely rewrite several of those scenes.
• I did download yWriter to my laptop in hopes that it might be helpful, since I know some of my friends use it. I'm . . . still figuring it out. And also wondering if I might've been better off to just stick with Microsoft Word. But everyone raves about how Scrivener is so amazing, and yWriter is the same type of software, just fewer features, so I thought I'd give it a try. I don't know. It's a muddle right now. People with yWriter or Scrivener: please remind me what I should be getting out of this program, because I feel like I might be missing something.

Reading!

• Apparently I only read twelve books this month. Which would be sad, except . . .
• Two of the books were rereads of The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. Which are gorgeously thick and enormous books, and which are as amazing and incredible as they are gigantic. So, rereading those took at least a week and a half, during which I rarely got to sleep before 10:30 because there's always another chapter and I for some reason think that saying "Hey, I'll read a chapter before I go to sleep" is a good idea. (Actually, it is a good idea for my reading habits. Just not good for my sleeping habits.)
• I also reread Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow as research for Monster in the Castle, since that book was one of the original inspirations for my story. And I reread Illusionarium, though I didn't record it on Goodreads. (I tried the recently-released audiobook, but wasn't thrilled- mostly because I wanted a British-sounding narrator and didn't get one. Oh well. That was my only real quibble with what I listened to of the book, so don't let me stop you from trying it yourself.)
• Then there were the new-to-me books I read: Moving Pictures (Discworld, and therefore weird, but also quite good), Prince of Demargen (an improvement over the first two! Go read it!), Relic (which I'd been looking forward to for a while, but which was . . . not quite what I was expecting?), Cascade (second in the River of Time series, which I liked about the same as I did the first), Reaper Man (more Discworld weirdly-awesome-ness), The Hero and the Crown (which was generally pretty good), and Whose Body (the first of the Lord Peter Whimsey mysteries; I'm sorry to say it disappointed me). Overall, not too bad.

Life!

• Snow. That happened. Not too much of it yet, thankfully. I'm still trying to get over the fact that Virginia got buried under snow and New York barely got any. (So far. Next month's February; we all know what that means . . .) 
• My sister and I worked our way through two Nancy Drew games: The Phantom of Venice and The Haunting of Castle Malloy. Both were fun- not my favorites, but fun. Though some bits of Castle Malloy could be tedious . . . like chasing sheep around in the dark. My sister will tell you that I eventually ordered asked her to finish that bit of the game for me, since I'd run out of patience. 
• I joined/helped start a Stormlight Archive roleplay on Whitehall Castle! I'm playing a proto-Edgedancer (who may or may not be based on one of my novel characters), and I'm super excited to see where the story goes. 
• I'm sure there should be something else here, but I can't for the life of me think of what it should be. School, I suppose, but no one wants to hear about that.

 February Plans!

• I am going to finish Monster in the Castle. I really am. I'm too close to the end to let another month go by without writing "The End." And I have the ending scenes all planned out (well, sort of- I have pictures in my head of the really important bits) and I really want to write them, so. It's going to happen.
• I'm also doing a month-long word war of sorts with some friends on Whitehall Castle. That'll help with the finishing-Monster-in-the-Castle goal as well. I expect I'll be sorely beaten, but I'll try my best anyway.
• And I'm going to continue editing and hopefully accomplish a bit more than I did this month. Maybe I'll even get past the annoying rewrite-heavy bits! Or figure out yWriter! 
• School stuff. Not going to talk about it because it's not especially interesting.
• Hopefully I'm going to read more than twelve books. But Bands of Mourning is out, and Calamity is coming out, so as long as I get those two, I'm happy. (I'd like more Discworld, though, and I'm hoping to reread the Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy. And The Eye of the World is waiting for me to pick it up as well . . .)   

 How's your January been? What plans do you have for February? If you use yWriter or Scrivener or similar, how do you use it? (I don't mean in the tutorial sense . . . I mean in the "what aspects of it do you find most helpful" and that sort of thing sense.) Please tell me in comments!

Thanks for reading!

-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)