Adrenalin makes me sick. :) Boy howdy! I didn't even make chat this week. I had to take a turn sometime this winter I guess. I got hit over the head with some upper-respiratory crud that has now settled in my throat. I can breathe now. Just can't talk. All the more reason to know ASL! I guess I'll go to class tomorrow as I have no excuse not to. They'd rather I talked with my hands!

Well, January is done. I did well this month. I lost my daily writing schedule BUT it did get six different manuscripts out of my house and into the world. Five went to the OWFI contest, but hey--it is five manuscripts. The sixth went to Cup of Comfort for Mothers and Sons. It is an essay of mine that I still love to read. Hope someone else "important" enjoys it just as much.

Oh, and then I had a most pleasant surprise. It seems no matter how meticulous I am in getting the OWFI entries ready to go, I mess something up. Or maybe it's submitting at the end of January that does it--I totally messed up my submission to Barefoot at the end of January. I had a cold then too. Fuzzy headed and tired--so similar to this week! That was THREE years ago--Wow! At any rate, I submitted a short-short story of mine called Black Olives. Initially I was going to enter it into the Adult Short-Short story category, but the protag is young and the more I thought about it the stronger I was pushed toward submitting it as a young adult short story. Problem was, I had already fixed a cover sheet for it and the front page of the MS was labeled with the cateogory name and number. No problem--print a new front page and a new cover sheet and we're done. Only I guess when I put it in the envelope, I put two copies of the MS in there--one with the YA category number and one with the Adult Short-short story cat number. But thankfully I mailed it to the YA category chair, who was so very kind as to call me this afternoon to ask where I really intended to submit it. Then he confessed that he had taken the liberty of reading the manuscript and said it was very good. :) He explained that very few of the entries fall into the "worthy of consideration" category, and fewer still rose above that, but that this story was worth sticking with, believing in and submitting.

So I've already won--here in my heart where it really counts. :) But he's still going to send it on to the judge for me. Bless you Gordon!

So sometimes your lemons can be turned into lemonade for you--and someone else is kind enough to do the squeezing! LOL!

Enjoyed the month. Loved my writing!