Patrick J. Heck

Despite the weather’s attempt to kill me, March was a great month. I’m not often bothered by SAD (seasonal affective disorder) but it is nice to see everything come back to life at the end of March. The extra sun is a bonus. Sort of. I’m an early riser, so losing the sun in the morning is rough those first few weeks, I have to admit.

I had two big goals for the month and accomplished neither of them. I think that’s great! Let’s talk about it.

Goal 1: Start querying my adult fantasy, THE EVERWINTER KING. I’ve never queried before. I spent all of February finishing my beta edits (and all of January researching agents). I was ready to go! Then I remembered Revise & Resub was hosting their next RevPit, with the prize being a full developmental edit with a professional editor. Of course, the goal is to be told I don’t need a full edit. It’d be great to hear that Everwinter is ready-to-go. But I wasn’t going to turn down this opportunity, so I submitted.

Results come out April 13th. I’ve been connecting with other contestants in the meantime and having a blast getting to know the other authors/WIPs. Such a good community of writers, and I’m excited to stay connected after RevPit ends.

If I’m selected, yippee. That’s two months of editing with a professional. If not, I have some ideas to fix a few manuscript weak points that have been lingering with me. I’ll spend the rest of April making those edits, then start querying in May.

Goal 2: Finish “Kitchen 2.0.” I’ll make a post one day about our kitchen renovation journey, but a quick summary for now: we had large kitchen plans and broke them up into two phases. Kitchen 1.0 happened last January/February. Kitchen 2.0 was a smaller job, so we planned to do most of it this month.

Naturally, we found sixty issues blocking the way on the day we started.

Okay—not sixty. That’s an exaggeration. But we have to do a little electrical work, so I’m waiting till my pseudo-electrician friend can come over and show me how. Electrical is the one home DIY thing I don’t mess around with. Once that’s done, we’ll get back to Kitchen 2.0.

I did finish all the yard and deck work I planned (minus, again, the electrical aspect). Yeehaw!

Some other accomplishments this month:

• Started two WIPs, one in earnest.
• Finished three beta reads that I adored.
• Learned about a future opportunity at my job. Less an opportunity and more a cool thing that’ll happen to me in the next few months.
• Got back into cold brewing tea.
• Went to the Le Creuset factory sale. This is less an accomplishment and more a reckless use of money, but it was fun!
• Helped my brother sell at his first pop-up. He broke his leg in January, and has been running a home bakery ever since.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all for now.

Oh, check out more silly tulips. I wrote about them a bit in this post, and a bunch more have popped up since!

And here’s my dog making a funny face because he got stung. Poor guy.