The Adventure That Was January

 So far the year has been full of writing adventure - from the fantastic SCBWI conference held in NYC last weekend to the focused insanity that is Write 1 Sub 1. This month was the first month of Write 1 Sub 1, a year-long project to write (and submit!) a short story every week.

I wrote five short stories in January:

1. Pomegranate Soda, about the challenges coming home from Iraq;
2. All We Know of Heaven and Hell, a sci-fi story about a woman who joins a dangerous space mission to earn the money to save her young daughter's life from leukemia;
3. Why Peter Came, a horror piece of flash-fiction where there's trouble at the Darling residence (I love this story but feel guilty turning my beloved Peter Pan stories into something darker);
4. Alien Lands, another realistic contemp story about life in Iraq;
5. Every Other Sunday, about family and grief.

I subbed out seven stories altogether to fourteen different markets.  Which allowed me to garner my first three rejections of the year (well, from that batch; there was another that came in on the 1st of the year, which was an especially nice touch).  I'm not too bothered by those numbers, though. Like many short story writers I sub to the top journals that seem appropriate and then work my way down the list.

I made my way about 1/3 of the way through this round of revisions on my novel The Goddess of Vengeance Wore Pink Galoshes. Sometimes I'm overcome by despair of the revision process, but usually I'm full of excitement about this story and the process of making it even better.

Aaand my YA mystery work-in-progress now has a working title: Recovering Sara. Love love love this thing, even in rough draft. I'm at about 13k and taking a break from writing to go through revisions - I was experimenting with first person present tense and I've decided first person past fits the tale a bit better. It was fun for me as a writer to do first person present, but I think it reads more accessibly this way.

So yeah. That's January. What are you guys up to this month? What's coming up in February?