What have I been working on lately?

I thought I’d bring all of you up to speed on a few things.

• The ‘Request for dedicated readers’ that I answered at critters.org is going fairly well – I’m up to around page 125 out of 184, so more or less on track for finishing by the end of the month. I’m liking the story so far, and hopefully I’ll have some helpful feedback to share with the author.
• New smartphone apps! I’ve been learning some good tricks with NS Basic App Studio, and have completed little apps for date calculator, (figuring the difference in days between two dates or the date result of offsetting an input date by a particular number,) and a data collection front end that feeds into a web application back end. I’ll post some screen captures in a few days if I remember.
• The Straight Dope Message Board short fiction contest went well, though I didn’t win in the voting. But I really like my story, which actually took the character of Lisa from Chatterboxes, which is fundamentally a speculative contemporary sci-fi book, and put her into an urban fantasy scenario, learning sorcery from a teacher who isn’t quite what she expected.
• I’m a little behind on my goal of submitting a story a week this month – I’ve done two, and I want to make a few more revisions to the Landing based on my critique tracking results before sending it out again.
• I’ve nearly finished the second out of three fandom chapter updates I wanted to make in May – this one is ‘Children of the Molecule’, my Roswell/Doctor Who crossover, which is finally drawing towards an end.
• And I’ve written a new scene for ‘The Long Way Home’, with Naveli getting Ereyu as a pet ferret.

It actually looks somewhat impressive when I type it out in a list like that.

Pages to be critiqued

Well, I picked up the screenplay at Staples this afternoon, and it looks really good!

I also managed to dash off a new intro to “The Long way home” using the Alphasmart, and I actually think it’s good enough that I want to read it out for fellow writers this week and see what they think of it. This is Princess Naveli getting Ereyu the ferret as a birthday present and pet, instead of running into her by accident on the palace grounds, which I think will be overall a good change for her character.

I need to remember to make time for my 500-word backstory pieces for the Storywonk workshop this week. I want to do them for four characters in “The long way home” – Princess Naveli, Tumaxool the bodyguard, Ereyu, and Merlik the mysterious magician.