Heyyy!

We made it to the end of February. Can you believe that it’s March again, because I literally cannot. As is now a tradition (in that I’ve done it twice), let’s talk about how the month of February went, eh?

At the beginning of the month, I set out a few goals for myself. They were:

• French:
  • 10 more crowns (start: 257)
  • read 4 news articles in French
  • Write one sentence a day in French
• Writing:
  • draft 50,000 words in youtube project
  • decide what to do about older project I’ve started thinking about editing again
  • send another round of queries

Looking back at this list now, I actually did a pretty good job at getting through most of it, though, if I’m being completely honest, the way I’ve been feeling the last two days, I don’t feel like I achieved anything much at all.

I’ve been feeling sort of out of it is what I’m saying.

Still, I did get almost 80k in the YouTube novel (though, yes, most of those words are ones I just directly lifted from draft one and then I wrote around them so that I can finish my plot/structure work), I sent another (very small) round of queries, and I decided that the old project I was thinking about resuscitating can, in fact, continue to live on the back burner for a while.

I got a lot more crowns in Duolingo — I went on a “getting everything I’d previously gotten to level 3 to level 5” binge over the last week — and while I did write my sentence most days, there’s definitely a very repetitive theme in what I end up saying.

And, like, sure, I am tired most days, but I think I just know how to say that I’m tired and that that’s at least 60% of the reason it’s written there so many times.

I wasn’t as good about reading full articles, though — I get a daily “good news” email from Le Monde, and so I would skim over those and try and figure out the gist of what they were talking about, but I hesitate to “count” that as a full article. One thing that I did learn from that, though, is that while I definitely have a sense of the basic vocabulary, I have a lot of gaps I need to fill in, especially with verbs and verb tenses.

I’d felt good through most of this month, but the last few days, I’ve really been dragging. I’ve been trying to be gentler with myself, but no amount of that really seems to be helping. You’ll see in my March goals tomorrow, I think, that I’ve tried to be a little easier on myself in terms of expectations. At least, I hope I’ve been easier with myself. Looking over the list I’ve drafted this evening, I don’t feel overwhelmed.

But then, I usually don’t at the start of things. It’s only once I’m in it that I’m like fucking hell we’ve done it to ourselves this time haven’t we?

Let me know how your February went! I’m sending you a warm hug through the internet.

x Elle