Happy Independence Day, all!  As I write this, I can hear the echoes from the firework show over at Stow House, about 10 minutes from where I live.  I took advantage of the holiday to do a bit of relaxing and ended up writing much, much more than I planned, which is a welcome change from the past few weeks.

I ended Round 2 of ROW80 a bit earlier than I had intended.  The end of the quarter, grading papers, traveling, and trying to deal with my schoolwork proved to be a bit more trying than I expected, but that’s why I love ROW80 — I didn’t feel too terrible or guilty taking a brief hiatus from my writing because I knew that Round 3 was right around the corner.

So here I am, tossing my hat into the ring once more.  I’m starting at a pretty strong place: Path to the Peacock Throne stands at 20k words, and while I’m gingerly feeling my way through a bit of a sticky section, I know that with a bit of perseverance and patience, I’ll make my way through the rough patch.  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve also given in and started scribbling down ideas for two other tales: a steampunk tale set in late 19th century San Francisco, tentatively titled tell me no lies, and a fantasy-esque tale in the vein of Anne Rice’s Claiming of Sleeping Beauty and Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, called Strange Bedfellows.  At the moment, Strange Bedfellows stands at roughly 7.5K words, which have poured out of me over the past few days.  I’m not complaining, though!

With that, here are my Round 3 goals:

• Write an average of 500 words/day on any project.  This means that I’m doubling my Round 2 word count goal, which makes me slightly nervous, but we’ll see how it goes!  I found myself exceeding the original 250 words/day goal consistently, so I don’t think this increase will be too burdensome.
• Complete Act 2 of Path to the Peacock Throne, and resist the urge to do too much editing to Act 1.
• Move from brainstorming and world-building tell me no lies to working on the first draft.