March Madness: March 2025 Writing Update

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Hello Spring!

 

March Madness: March 2025 Writing Update

What a month it has been! Between Ramadan, Zombie March, The City of Light, and a couple of other projects, this past month has been busy, busy, busy. March madness is real! 

Zombie March Horror Writing Course

I'm still running off the high of launching the first run of my horror writing course, Zombie March, which opened for enrollment last night. This labor of love and passion has been, for me, a huge step forward. It's my first ever online course, and through it I have shown myself that I can design a full curriculum, craft its content and materials, and publish it online for fellow writers or authors of horror fiction to enjoy.

By the way, if you want a big discount on the course, subscribe to the newsletter.
March's edition of the newsletter has a nice, chunky coupon code 😜

This process has also shown me different ways to present my courses and educational programmes. While Zombie March functions in a traditional online-course structure, I've already started planning other educational programs which use unique and innovative ways to engage with students one-on-one while still being largely asynchronous and not highly time-consuming for the busy learner. 

Let's just say that I now know I have the tools and the ability to make more awesome learning programs, and I'm not afraid to use them! I talked recently about Project YN, which I'll be focusing on more in April, and I've also teased a little something about a SPLITE Worldbuilding course, which I'll be discussing in more depth in the latter half of April.

Phew, that's a lot!

The City of Light

I'll admit that because I was so preoccupied with Zombie March, I didn't get the chance to work on The City of Light as much as I'd wanted to this month. But not to fret, because I still managed to get Chapters 1 and 2 out to my newsletter subscribers - yet another reason to join the newsletter!  

The current plan is for this to be my next fiction release, so I'm invested in getting this book done ASAP! I'm a little behind my own original schedule - March was the month of finishing the manuscript, but alas, when you're late with one thing, you're late with everything. It's the domino effect, a core law of organizing your time. Or something like that.

The Black Hare

I did do a little work for this interactive fiction this month, too, surprisingly enough. It wasn't planned, but for a few days when I felt like I was a little burnt out from Zombie March, I flipped to working on something completely different - this IF being the completely different project. I'm grateful that I did, because it allowed me to take a moment to finish plotting the Prologue, get someone to playtest it, and get some valuable feedback that I'm not trying to apply.

Unfortunately, despite wanting to share the Prologue way back in January, I still haven't completed it yet. I'm still getting used to the Twine workflow, and I wish they included a feature that would allow you to visually see which passages are complete and which need more work, because I'll often move on in other areas of the story and forget that I've left a certain set of passages in need of completion. Something as simple as a check-box to mark a passage complete would be helpful. I wonder if I can use tags for that.

March is Out, April is In!

When all's said and done, March was crazy productive for me, alhamdulillah. I've been working in relative silence, and I've also decided that I will really only be using my social media more as a feed for announcements, sharing blog posts and podcast episodes, and so on. It's otherwise simply too distracting and too time-consuming, and I want to ensure that if I'm sinking my hours into anything, it's going to be solid work for my projects.

Today is the first of April, and as much as I want to say that I'm going to take a little break to decompress from the busy month that was March, the truth is probably that I'm going to jump right into another project and switch gears. In fact, I kind of already have...

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