It’s time to start the third round of Round of Words in Eighty Days, the writing challenge that knows you have a life. In this challenge, each writer works toward their own goals over the course of almost three months. This is my fifth round with ROW80. I joined up for the third round of 2011, and let me tell you, my fellow ROWers have been a huge source of inspiration.

Last round, I set a singular goal; revising the first draft of my novel Queen Witch. While I made major progress, I still have a bit to go to finish that one. I don’t think having a singular goal helped my productivity level. The truth is, these different writing stages take different parts of the brain — they’re just separate processes. I seem to accomplish more overall when I’m working on multiple projects.

And that brings me to my goals for round three:

1) My first goal for this round is to finish revisions on my novel Queen Witch. I’ll have this done by July 15.

2) I’ll publish my short story collection, The Harshands and Eternal Summer, in late July. This is another hold over that I thought I’d get to in May, but still haven’t.

3) Next I need to get back to the Children of the Sidhe paranormal romance series. My second goal is to print and revise Flight, the third novella in that series. I’ll work on this starting July 15, including going through the first draft on paper, editing and revising, and adding notes and details for any new scenes; then writing any new scenes; and finally incorporating all of these changes into the electronic manuscript. Flight will not go back on the shelf (well, maybe for a couple of weeks…). After these revisions, it’s straight into editing, sending to betas, and publishing in round four.

4) Finally, while I’m still in the revision stage of two projects, I can’t wait to write something new. The fourth Children of the Sidhe novella is swirling in my mind, and I’ll only be able to contain that for so long. So August 1 I’ll start drafting that novella, Descent. I can’t wait to write the characters in this book.

I can’t wait to see what everyone else is working on this summer. Good luck to all of my writer friends partaking in the challenge. 🙂