It’s March 27th, 2016! Let’s do that update thing I do.

I had goals for Week Twelve, and this is what they were:

• Write Shapes 2 Part 8
• Write Week 3 for Writing Game Year 2
• Continue broad edits on Writing Game Year 1
• Finish line edits on Shapes 1
• Maintain the blog
• Submit a short story, not necessarily Shibboleth

I did pretty good this week, and I had family in town during the latter part of the week, so I’m calling that a pretty big win.

I’m through two of the stories for the Writing Game Year 1. As a reminder, this is simply making all of the formatting the same throughout so it’s easier to work with as actual editing phases begin, which will require input from the other four authors to proceed smoothly.

Shapes 2 Part 8 and Writing Game 2 Part 3 both went smoothly. I have a hard word limit on the Writing Game entries, and they are especially difficult to edit down while still getting everything I wanted into them, but it’s been fun so far. Writing Game Year 2 has only four authors total, and we cut the number of weeks down from eleven to ten.

My story this year is treading heavily on mech stories from anime, titled Heroes Found Wanting. I don’t know in what direction the story will go, if it will focus on the politics, the battles, the characters, or if it will perhaps (and secretly wishing it to) go ultra-cerebral like my favorite mech stories. I don’t touch it again until Week Six, so it’s out of my hands for a while!

I wrote last week for a fantasy romance titled On the Battlefield, which is very much set in a D&D styled world, with magic and cantrips and blue-haired wizards and whatnot. I read a little bit of fantasy romance and romantic fantasy (they’re different, I swear), so it’s not an entirely unfamiliar style for me.

This week I wrote for a suspense/thriller/mystery/horror (uncertain so far) story titled The Prison at Splint Creek. If it continues to be more suspense/thriller than mystery/horror it will be a style of story I don’t write basically at all, so it’ll be fun to write something that isn’t in or adjacent to my wheelhouse.

Next week I’ll be writing for an urban fantasy story titled Vampire Money. It’s a curious one so far. There’s a lot of teenage jargon going on, and I don’t write urban fantasy, though I read a decent amount of it, so I’m excited to get to it and see what I can do with it.

I submitted a novelette (7,500 words) to a Reddit writing contest for one of my favorite subreddits, /r/WritingPrompts. The contest has a kind of token payment, but it’s free to enter and it isn’t a popularity contest as only those entering the contest get to vote in it. But this fulfilled my submit a short story goal.

And that’s basically it. I had a pretty good week overall, and I’m hoping to just keep that going. I might not be meeting every goal, but I’m moving ahead like I want to. Starting with Week Fourteen, I will likely be instituting a kind of quarterly goal, which will be overarching goals I need to accomplish in that time period in order to finish all my goals by the end of the year.

For Week Thirteen, my goals are thus:

• Write Shapes 2 Part 9
• Write Week 4 for Writing Game Year 2
• Continue broad edits on Writing Game Year 1
• Finish line edits on Shapes 1
• Maintain the blog
• Submit a short story
• Write a short story

Until next week, take an idea you’ve had knocking around in your head and write some of it down. You don’t want to forget it, so make sure it’s recorded somewhere. Write it down, type it in, create a voice memo, whatever what you have to do.

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As always, follow me on Facebook and Twitter with #breakingauthor. Keep on striving for those goals.

And always remember to write the hell on!