August Goals and Plans

August is the month of goats! Also, the shortest 'Daily Goats' on the Blackwood farm since... probably some time in the late 90s? We have only one mother-to-be this year, due on the 22nd. They're most likely going to be solid black with white markings (British Alpine), but could be solid black (Australian Melaan). I'm going to take as many pictures of them as I can, but given my record I guess I'd better not promise anything will appear here...

Writing-wise, I plan to make August a month of flash fiction. I have to write two stories for assessment and I've been wanting to do a bit of world exploration for some of my big projects, so I have this idea about combining the two things and writing flash set in those worlds. I also have a bit of 'alternate universe' stuff I want to do for two (not quite) abandoned characters to see if I can find a world that accommodates their abilities, and I have two sections of my current major project 'The Nightmare Box' that I want to finish rewriting.

Goals for August:

* Write and polish at least 2 flash stories.
* Always Be Writing - constantly have at least 1 flash story in active planning/writing/editing mode.
* Finish editing/rewriting the two sections of TNB.
* Initial plan for revising two of my totally-not-abandoned projects.
* Read 4 books (3 free choice, 1 nonfiction).
* Blog stuff.
* Complete all assessment tasks for uni (1 essay, 1 quiz, 2 short stories + exegesis, 4 sets of forum posts).

I have no idea what to blog about, so at the moment I'm creating redundant rainbow chickens again by posting the same things here as on my Steve PPT. Anyway, this is my August. Flash fiction, some planning, a bit of rewriting, a lot of assessment-related panic. On with the show.

Hmm... August flash/short fiction challenge for Steve? As long as I'm going to be doing it anyway, I might as well put it up as a challenge. That seems to be my basic philosophy for challenges - if you're doing it anyway, post a set of rules so anyone else who wants to can try the same thing. In this case the rules would be really simple, since the only requirement is to write something that's somewhere around the right length. Or should it be a '1000-word chunk' challenge instead so I don't have to feel like I've failed if I end up with something that's really a part of a novel?