Guess who just blitzed their way through a submission process? If it's not me then whose blog did I just invade? Well, yeah, it's me. I intended to write more about the process of me completing this secret project but things just got so hectic that I wouldn't have finished if I did take that time out.
The deadline got extended, thankfully, because November was already busy with me moving house. Then it got super busy at work, which I should have anticipated because it's exam period like right now. So of course students wanted more help, leaving me with less time to write, and thanks to an incompetent coworker who I had to correct the mistakes of, even more so. This week in general I got some beta readers to have a look through it and made tonnes of corrections, which I of course did on the last day. I did improve the story massively, the ending was super weak, but I literally lost sleep over it.
One of the most annoying bits was trying to format the document. First the font was all messed up, different on different scenes. Then I had to catch all the social media posts within the story which I formatted differently to the main text, and I kept missing some and had to keep reformatting and publishing.
Anyway, I got there in the end, and played a few hours of Spider-man PS4 to flush the stress and story from my brain. What did I even write about? I can't remember.
My only remaining annoyance is that after finishing that, I only have ten days to plan, write, revise and format a story for the second open submission call. Considering it just took me a week to do the editing part for the last one, and I don't even have a solid idea yet, I don't think I'll manage it. That's got me more annoyed than a raccoon discovering locked trash cans because it's very rare that there's open calls for anything I can write and these ones came at the same time.
Thing is though, after spending half of the day relaxing I'm kinda keen to get into something again. So I might do some planning and see how it goes. I can always self publish it if I miss the deadline. That reminds me, I still have a lot of stories to publish as extras here that I haven't done yet. Must get on to that.
So big thanks to Film Critic Hulk, J. Mills, Darth Malbec and SJ Whitby, author of the fantastic Cute Mutants series for their help and advice.