The Beginnings of Progress

Well, I'm very tired but happy. Today I managed to reach my daily goal of 500 words. In fact, I went slightly over it, and managed 560 words. I probably could have even managed more since writing was coming somewhat easily tonight, but my husband wanted me to watch all of the Terminator movies with him (we managed to get through the first two, and we plan to watch the third tomorrow, before the premiere of the TV series), so I was pretty distracted for the majority of the evening. Still, I at least managed my daily word count.

In other writing news, that website, http://www.duotrope.com/, that my friend left in a comment to my previous entry is both quite interesting and helpful. I recommend it highly to writers. It makes finding markets for various types of writing a lot easier. Through my own efforts at detective work, I had managed to hunt up some publications for fantasy, but my discoveries were only a handful compared to the treasure trove that this site pulled up for me. To that end, I began poking around some of the websites of these publications and I found a call for submissions that interested me. It's for short stories, but since I'm hoping to improve mine anyway, I figure why not give it a shot? And since they want fairy tale re-tellings, I figure that it's a good place to start, since I will have a loose framework for my short story to build upon. I'm hoping that something like this will help me ease into writing short stories, and that I will soon feel more comfortable writing my own completely original material (I have already begun a list of ideas, which I hope to further develop in the future, after I finish this project).

So, I'm starting to chug (or is it slug? *wink*) along, writing wise. The momentum is slow, and I don't expect it will speed up noticeably any time soon, but maybe one day later this year, I'll be able to look back and say to myself, "Wow, I've really come a long way and accomplished a lot."

Now why is it I'm having flashbacks to that story my mother read me, The Little Engine that Could? Oh, yeah...that's right. I'm the little engine.

Who says books never teach you anything, eh? That's at least one lesson from a book that I guess I picked up well enough.