It's suppose to be fifty on Monday. That's bikini weather in Iowa right now. And while I've probably all got people imagining pasty white Iowans running around in skimpy swimsuits, I am going to try and divert attention to my completed goals for the month.

My goal was to write 27,083 words. I wrote 27,093. And the last about 900 words of that was at 8:30 at night when I really should have been getting ready for school the next day.

What did my February writing include? This is a list - though not very detailed.

-Additions to Her Testament to Life
- The SOS scene
- Typing journal entries - both in the Keep Life Simple journal and the Pink Bird one.
- Portfolio work (Almost 10K total for the year.)
- 4 blog posts
- 2 co-written subplots
- The very beginning of a West Wing fanfiction
- 2 scholarship essays
- Annotated Bibliography and History Day paper (on Jane Austen)
- Public Address and Oratory for IHSSA Competition
- Sociology research and the beginnings of a paper
- 2 school pen pal letters
- 5 poems

Now that's a lot of writing. But it is also a lot of not writing. All but about 1600 words was not on novels. Granted, my school words have to be written no matter what happens. And WriYe counts them as words, so I count them too.

My portfolio needs things to show how I've improved and the journals are so I don't have to carry five pounds of journals with me wherever I move. Both of these last two things are part of my goals for the 2010 year.

But I also have a bigger goal. I want to start querying my first novel, Her Testament to Life before the end of the year. But first I have to get it to length and then go back and re-edit it. At the pace I'm going, it's going to take me over 407 days just to get the novel to length. Then there's editing.

So, this month, my goal is editing and I want the majority of my words (51% or higher) to be on either Her Testament to Life or Ruined Emotions, both of which are novels.

Here's to hoping this works because my novel desparately needs more meat to it.