I accomplished less writing tasks in March than I hoped for. That’s because of making two trips to West Texas, one to pick up the grandkids, bringing them here for a week, and one to bring them back.

1. Make one more editing pass through The Teachings, and decide if it is ready for publishing. Get my ideas for the cover to the designer and get things rolling on that. This is done! I make another full pass through the book, reading it aloud to my wife. The edits are done. I also got my ideas to the designer, Sophie, and she has made the cover, made into a theme for the series as a whole. That is no longer a hold-up.
2. Make major progress in the church 100th anniversary book. I’d like to be close to 15,000 words by the end of the month. That depends, however, on getting into the library for research, or having a librarian help me. I definitely made progress, though I fell short of my word goal. I’m sitting a little under 9,000 words. I did hear back from the librarian, though she didn’t have much to tell me due to the poor quality of the microfilms she had to work with.
3. Read for research in the next Documenting America book, including taking notes. Begin to sketch an outline of the Table Of Contents. I read for this research only one day. Too many other things to work on.
4. Continue with my current Bible study project and see if it’s something I should turn into a writing project with the intent on publishing. Again, I think I only worked on this one day. My goals were much larger than my capacity.
5. Get my personal bibliography up to date for current works. This should be doable. In fact, I may go work on it as soon as I finish this blog post. I didn’t work on this much before the mid-month time crunch came, but I think I got this done. I will have to pull up the bibliography and see. If needed, I’ll come back and edit this.
6. Blog twice a week. That may be interrupted if we bring the grandkids back here for spring break. I missed three regular blogging days, as I said in a post this month, due to grandparent responsibility.

So, March was a mixed bag. Time to now set some goals for April.

1. Publish The Teachings. All that are left are various publishing tasks, including: e-book TOC; adding two maps, one of which needs modification; writing the back cover copy; writing the Amazon page text; formatting the print book (well, the e-book too, which is far easier); and uploading to Amazon. I think this is very doable.
2. Republish the three earlier church history novels with new covers and list of my works. One of the covers is ready. Hopefully the other two will be soon.
3. Expand the church anniversary book to at least 15,000 words and hopefully 20,000 words.
4. Blog twice a week. It’s doable. No travel planned this month.
5. Do some research on the next Documenting America volume. I won’t commit to how much, but I have to get going on it.
6. Look again at the Bible study I was working on in February and early March, and decide if that is going to be my next book or if something else is.

That’s all I can see to add right now. I’ll check back in on April 30 or May 3 and let you know how I did.