March Ishness

March marched on... and April snuck up on me unawares. Thankfully, we have a remedy for that. It's called ISHNESS! A meme created by Deborah O'Carroll over at Road of a Writer

Life-ing

It's been a good, hard, long, rough, wonderful, awful month. That about sums it up pretty well. Someone in my family has been sick pretty much constantly throughout the second half of the month, and I fear that I'm coming down with it now.

However, it's also been a good month. We seem to have accepted and dealt with the time change, finally, and the sun is shining a bit more consistently. After a few days of sunny, 60, spring-like weather, we had a marvelous moment of Winter's Last(??) Hurrah right before Easter in a spectacular, swirling blizzard. This, coming on the heels of reading about a "Sugar Snow" in Little House in the Big Woods, was really a fun moment of literature and history come to life.

Brittany's Leavin' Home album had a lovely release and we in the Stormcave are all super thrilled that this album of beautiful, fun music is now available to the world.

We finally got bikes for our children. Yep, Leiana's 7 and only just now getting her first bike. Don't judge. I blame this lapse on NC's summers and hills. They are super thrilled to have "real" bikes and have been outside practicing every chance they get (of course, it's been raining a lot lately, so they haven't gotten much time on their new bikes... but now that Spring is here, hopefully the nice days for playing outside will get more plentiful.

Writing

I should just label this "editing" for now and be done with it. But, I've made a lot of good progress on this first pass of content edits through Minstrel's Call. Lots of good notes. Lots of rewrites, but nothing quite as major as Yorien's Hand had to go through (I had to basically rearrange the entire story... that was fun). I finally made it past the 100-page mark, which always just feels like a major achievement to me. That's kind of when the uphill slogging ends and I start to find my stride.

Reading

Mostly beta-reading this month, which is different. I don't do a lot of beta-reading, but these two projects have been extremely delightful (I finished one and am nearly half-way done with the other). I won't say much more about them, because: beta-reading. But I will say that it's been a pleasure to read these projects and I'm excited about seeing what happens with them upon completion!

Watching

I am trying to slowly introduce our children to movies that aren't animated. I have nothing against animated movies, don't get me wrong. It's just that there are such wonderful live-action movies out there, too, and I'd like to be able to watch a few of them now and then... without having to wait for my kiddos to go to bed first. Also, one can only watch so many animated movies over and over again before one begins to go a little crazy.

Anyway, this month, we watched Sky High (one of my favorite cheesy ridiculous movies, and Kurt Russell's greatest movie ever (okay, maybe not... but still, it makes me laugh so hard)), and I introduced the kids to The Sound of Music (we haven't finished it yet, but they are really loving it, which makes my heart happy), and The Princess Diaries (which I think was a little over their heads, but they seemed to enjoy it ok).

Derek and I were supposed to go see Batman Five Superman, but decided to postpone until next weekend because we didn't want to give our coughs to a babysitter. (I know it's Batman V Superman, but it's a dumb name, and that's now how you abbreviate "versus" and I'm a nerd, so just go with it, k?)

April Plans

My current goal is to finish this round of editing by April 29th and send the book off to beta readers and my line editor in the early part of May. Also, we're going back "home" to Raleigh for a visit at the beginning of May, so that gives me yet another reason to accomplish this goal.

How was your March? Any big plans for April?