Happy March!  I’m pleased to report that I completed my February writing goal, and finished this revision pass of Guardian III.  I plan to let it sit for now; I’m waiting on one final beta-reader response, and I plan to read it aloud in a couple of months and then make final tweaks.  With a launch date in December, things are looking good so far.

In March I’m turning away from revision and towards some short stories.  I’m diving back into my short story for an upcoming anthology; well, possibly wading in gradually because I’ve been a bit stuck so far.  I wrote 80% of the story months ago and just need to finish it off, but I’m having trouble getting into the flow.  I’m sure it will come…and then I can go on to finish my second story for the same anthology!

I think I’ve mentioned this project before – the anthology premise is for short stories about people magically entering into familiar books.  It’ll be out later this year.  Right now I’m working on a story about a ballet dancer entering into the original Gaston Leroux Phantom of the Opera (which I reread recently).  My second short story is about a boy going to Neverland in Peter Pan.  I hope to finish both before the end of March.  We’ll see!

I did enjoy a bit I’ve written so far, though I may eventually decide it’s too heavy-handed.  Here it is anyway.

**********

Following Christine and Raoul began to seem like an even less wise choice when they started climbing up.

And up and up and up, stairs after stairs, until I finally realized they had to be heading to the roof.

It was a lot more steps than I had imagined when I watched the play.  I mean, I was a ballet dancer; I had strong legs and good breath control, but this opera house had to be ten, twelve flights tall, easily.  Why did they think this was where they wanted to go?  And why had it seemed logical in the play?  When I was seven flights up with more stairs disappearing into the gloom above me, it seemed far less reasonable that Christine had run away in terror from the Phantom by climbing all the way up to the rooftop.  The building was a labyrinth, but there were simpler ways to get out of it than this.

It was a good reminder to me that these people were fictional.  Fictional.  If they were behaving strangely, it was because some author somewhere in the real world had made a dubious decision.