“A New Face on an Old Place” is done! Put roughly 500 more words into it today, coming up with a final word count of around 3,300. I’m going to let it sit for a few days, get a couple of people to read it, then read it again myself. After that, it’s getting fired off to Unidentified Funny Objects as my second submission there. Here’s hoping it works out! All in all, it took about 9 hours to write. It felt like a lot longer than that, though. I was really struggling with parts of it.

I began work on a fable today, not something I typically write. Spark’s anthology contest this year has to do with fables, and it seems like a worthwhile challenge. The working title is “The Rabbits of Forest Warren.” That may not be the final title, but it’s a start. The planning phase is finished and the rough draft is done at about 2,050 words. It’s really rough, but it’s done. The structure is sound enough, and so is the moral of not relying solely on another for your own defense. It just needs a lot of prettying up. I may dig into my Redwall books tomorrow for some ideas on the language side of things.

Also, I’ve decided to rewrite “A Necessary Sacrifice” for the Writers of the Future contest deadline this month. I had originally written it for the anthology of Unlikely Entomology last year, and it was rejected. Now that I’ve read several articles on story and plot structures I can see the faults in the original tale, although I did like the premise of it. I think with some reworking it’ll be good enough for the big time. The story will also need to be lengthened just a bit. The original tale came in at 7,200 words which is on the low end for what the Writers of the Future typically accepts. I think it’ll need to be more in the 9,000 – 12,000 range. With the way I plan to rewrite it, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Though today wasn’t very productive from a word count perspective, we did manage to write enough to exceed last month’s total word count and total salable word count. With 11 days left until March is over, that’s promising!

• Nonfiction: 397
• Planning and outlining: 785
• Short Fiction: 2,550
• Novel Fiction: 000
• Salable words: 3,300

Total Fiction for Month: 52,157

Total Salable for Month: 13,940

Total Fiction for Challenge Year: 102,380

Total Salable for Challenge Year: 24,884