WIP Crackin' Wednesday

"Release the Crackin'!"

My mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read.

Writing

This week was dedicated to both doing review on the novel, and working on getting some stories cleaned up and out the door. I made a little more progress on “Third Time Charm”, where I got to have my pirate captain, well. Be piratical, but in a good way. That was fun to write!

I got reviews from my writer’s group for a couple of stories (“Carry Job”, and “Down Among the Dead Men”) and wanted to get them both out this week. I succeeded with CJ, but got some solid feedback on DATDM that I want to mull over. The deadline for DATDM is the end of the month, so I want to get that finished up and out the door this week. Oh, and I turned around “Harrold of the Gods” and got it out there again. So I met my goal of getting two stories submitted. Go me!

Novel-wise, I wrote 2-3 new scenes to help glue existing bits together, and I expect that this week will be more of the same.

Commitments for this week:

• Keep on plugging on “Third Time Charm”

• Get “Down Among the Dead Men” cleaned up and submitted

• Finish at least three of the missing scenes I’ve identified in Sigils

Editing

Doing well! As mentioned, I’ve done revisions on a couple of short stories. For Sigils, I’m ahead of schedule, but I got there by cheating. There’s one sequence (maybe three chapters, a little over 12k words) that I decided to start with. It covers a single span of time (one day) and already hangs together well.

Something I’ve noticed is that I have a couple of “chapters” where I’m writing a sequence of scenes from a character’s POV other than my MC. Those tend to tell a story in and of themselves, but they aren’t put into the proper order in the novel as a whole. I’m going to tackle that this week.

An example: there’s one character who has a series of “job interactions” at his office over the course of a couple of weeks. All of which impact the story and the MC. I wrote them all from his POV and put them in one folder, though. Which was great for keeping things consistent, but now I need to sprinkle those scenes throughout the rest of the book so they make sense.

I also spent an evening reviewing a long-ish (4k) document for a non-profit. This is going to be presented to donors both as a report on where we are, and as an ask for further funding. Unless I suddenly make it to the top of the Official Alphabetical List of Author Success, this is quite likely the highest potential ROI writing/editing that I’ve ever done.

Commitments for this week:

• Keep to my established editing schedule

• Work on getting scenes into (roughly) story-chronological order

Reading

No progress, either on Broken Roads: Returning to my Amish Father or on writer’s group critiques. You’ll see why in a moment. So I’m going to have to work on both of those. I did add critiques to my schedule, though, so at least I will get a reminder that I should be doing something there.

Commitments for this week:

• Start Broken Roads

• Critique at least one story for my writer’s group

Other

The Day Job has ramped up significantly. Not in a bad way - I’m writing code, and working on a significant project. Which makes me happy. The issue right now is that, at the moment, the team for this project consists of me - so there’s a lot more on my plate now. Enough that my team lead and I have already discussed my schedule. Particularly the non-Day Job things (i.e., my writing) that I absolutely need to make room for.

So part of what I will have to do this week is to consider my other areas of involvement, and where I can or can’t continue to volunteer time. Especially if I want to keep doing certain things like sleep, or maintaining my health. There’s not much there, but it might be time for some of them to go. Check in next week to see hwo it all goes!