March tends to be an interesting month – the transition from winter to spring is often unpredictable, but the longer daylight is a source of motivation and optimism.

When it comes to hiking, March is typically the month when I first have the chance to enjoy the early spring flowers. Despite that, many of my March hikes – I managed 4 in total – were quite bleak, with cloudy skies and a chance of rain showers (which, fortunately, didn’t happen). As usual, I’ll go into more details soon. For now, I can say that I did manage to find some early wildflowers.

On that topic, I finally got myself to finalize and submit a handful of suggestions for next year’s hikes – the hiking club starts building the plan in April or May, with the final version being ready in the early autumn.

When it comes to other aspects of my life, that’s been mixed – though I was also quite busy at work, so I consider the result decent. I finished one book in the first half of the month and took a break on that front in the second half of the month.

I also managed to make some minor writing progress – as hinted by my last week’s post. I rewrote a good chunk of one problematic chapter (the rest of that chapter was edited before). This was a challenge, because I’ve struggled to get any decent idea on how to fix the chapter, and the one I had seemed quite hard – but it was the best one, so I got myself to push through. I also kept making minor fixes to issues as I found them when scrolling through my notes and the current draft of book two.

Then, I also made a change that affected the second and third book alike – I decided to repurpose one chapter from early book three into the ending sequence of book two, for a couple of reasons, though I’ll eventually ask my beta readers for their opinion on that change – I definitely don’t want to make the “outro” a bit too drawn out, but with the changes made to book two and the continuity to book three it has led to, it makes more sense this way.

I also had several minor ideas for changes I’ll need to do in book three, once I get to that point, so those were mostly just notes put into the main file to deal with later. That part of the story is still in a rough version and will need a lot of attention, especially in regards to changes made in book two and mentions to these events. And deciding the scope and level of detail of some subplots.

In my experience so far, the second half of April tends to be beautiful and motivating, so I’m planning to take a few days off work after Easter and make some time for writing more.

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So, that’s a quick rundown of the past month. I hope March has been nice to you, and that April will be a good month for you.