One or two celebrations (Big Dreams Blog Update #17)

It's Update Day time!

Along with 18 other bloggers, I decided to air the dirty on my craziest goal yet... Though with each passing blog hop post I realize it's not entirely as crazy as it was when I first signed up to this.

Hosted by authors Misha Gericke and Beth Fred, Update Day is a time for us to re-cap our adventures for the month and if any of those said adventures had anything in moving us forward towards our wacky goals.

We're always looking for new blog hop members, so please join us for the fun. It's BYOB crazy btw.

Now was it me? Or was this month really long…?

I mean the last two weeks especially were just dragging by, and the blast of cold here from Mother Nature had a lot to do with it.

I always look forward to February because it means Groundhog Day, V-day, and when I was in school, our spring break, and some other family occasions take place during this month (i.e. parents’ anniversary), BUT I really look forward to it because it often means spring is around the corner and there’s a good chunk of sunshine and warm weather to come…

And the opportunities! Because it’s only the 2^nd month it totally feels like the rest of the year is mine for the taking, goal-wise.

Getting ahead of myself here, so let’s start with what I’ve accomplished this month:

In the reading sphere, I have my 21^st review ready to go for tomorrow. I didn’t read as much as I wanted this month. More so these last few days… But I’m still very happy with what I have read.

My writing, on the other hand, jumped all over the place. Once again fro the first week of February, I continued a pattern of lacking productivity. I hopped from idea to idea, never settling down long enough to build a rapport with the characters of any stories.

Until around February 8^th…

That’s when I learned of a contest being held by Mills & Boon for one of their miniseries, The Chatsfield. The contest was a twitter pitch that involved, as you might have already expected, writing a 140-character pitch of a story tagged as #HotelScandal and set in the fictional hotel chain, the eponymous Chatsfield.

So I wrote up a #HotelScandal pitch and entered early, and that happened on February 11^th.

And then all contestants waited out the rest of the week until noon BST/GMT Friday the 13^th. Initially there was supposed to be three pitch winners from the batch of entries, but because M&B editors were blown away by the quality, they chose FIVE winners.

I was, unfortunately, not one of the five.

BUT I did get this:

An honourable mention! Pretty snazzy if I do type so myself… ^0^

That was enough to motivate me to write the 10K story based on my pitch that the five winners have posted up today on the M&B blog. Please go check the shorts out HERE, read them and vote!

Anyways, because I wrote the story I decided to post it as well. It seems nonsensical for me to write something and not share it. I posted it on Wattpad. If you want to read it, here it is. Do enjoy.

Now my next writing/WIP move is to work on a PNR short story/novella. I’ve dived in today to get the beginning kick started—I’m not always a fan of beginnings, you see. I’m also hoping to have something ready to go for a contest I’ve been eyeing now for a month, so we’ll see if all of that works out.

Hopefully I’ll have this much more to say about writing, and then some at the end of March.

In other celebratory news, this is my 100^th post. Yay!

This one sorta snuck up on me… I realized I hit the big 1-double ‘oh’ a few days ago.

When I started this blog, it was totally with a noncommittal mindset. I honestly gave myself the leeway, room, whathaveyou to stop posting if I hated it. But as time went on I’ve actually enjoyed it and I don’t doubt that a lot of my success in setting goals and completing them, pushing out of my comfort zone is all due to this little piece of virtual property.

So here’s to the first one hundred, and one hundred more.