Madly rushing towards a deadline

There’s a bit of a trainwreck feeling about this, though I’m still hoping to be able to divert the engine into a siding before it falls off the broken bridge into the canyon.

*g* I had earmarked April as being the month that I would put together a submission for Mark Probst’s military YA anthology (deadline for submission = 30th of April.) I thought I had plenty of time to do a plot plan and a 5,000 word sample. What I didn’t remember/realize was that the first two weeks of April was a school holiday, so I would have bored children at home needing to be entertained. And that during the next week my eldest daughter would be at home ill. And that this week my youngest daughter would be at home ill, and I would be feeling grotty myself. This has somewhat bollixed up the timescales, and now I have only two days in which to meet the deadline.

Fortunately I do now have the plot plan finished. And I have 2,389 words of the sample 5,000 done. I’m actually starting to get very fond of it. It has convict transport ships, jail fever, convict rebellion, shipwreck, living on a desert island, being rescued, being accused of sodomy and an eventual happy ending. If only we weren’t all so ill, and the girls would both go back to school and give me a decent amount of time to work on it!

Also, no title. It was going to be ‘Fool for love’ but I abandoned the idea of Garnet pretending to be insane in order to scare off the girls. So that doesn’t fit now. ‘Shipwrecked’? ‘Blessed Isle’? ‘Cabin Fever’? The amazing adventures of Captain Harry Thompson and his paramour Garnet? I hate titles! Maybe ‘Blessed Isle’ for now.