My mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read.
Writing
As promised, I took some time this week and focused on getting “Down Among the Dead Men” done and out the door this week. So that’s three (or is it four?) stories out there right now. Didn’t get anything done on “Third Time Charm” because I was primarily working on the novel.
Novel-wise, I wrote four new scenes to help glue existing bits together and revised a few scenes to bring them into line with the rest of the novel.
My commitments for this week:
Keep on plugging on “Third Time Charm”
Write four more scenes to fill in the holes in the opening act of Sigils
Editing
Going well, I think. I’m also at the point where I’m splitting things into chapters, for ease of review/management. It looks like things are ending up at 4-5 scenes/4k-5k per chapter, which feels like a decent enough chunk of the story.
I’m also far enough along (two weeks) that I think I can draw some conclusions about my editing, too…
Having a schedule has helped tremendously. Daily goals motivate me, even if I don’t make them. I have a running goal of where I should be, which helps.
However, I’ve actually done the majority of my editing in two rather large chunks, which has helped push me ahead of schedule a bit.
It feels like I need to block off at least two hours, preferably three, for those larger editing runs. I end up trying to hold larger chunks of the story in my head at once. Maybe a chapter or two, or multiple related scenes spread out across chapters.
When I have that time, and I get into the zone, I can edit 3-4 scenes per hour.
For those interested, here’s what my “editing schedule” looks like. It’s five pages, one line per day, with my calendar conflicts listed so I can see what days I’m likely to get nothing done. To me, those are bonus days - if I can get something done, great! If not, oh well. Each day has a planned # of scenes I’d like to edit, and there’s a running total to help remind me of where I should be as the days tick by.
Keep in mind, these are purely developmental edits. I’m trying to get the story on the page to hang together with no glaring inconsistencies and to flow naturally from one scene to the next. That’s it. Once this is all done, I’ll do yet another editing pass for line editing, tone, environmental cues, spelling, grammar…
Yeah, I have a lot of editing in my future. As I said last week: I expect that this week will be more of the same.
My commitments for this week:
Keep to my established editing schedule
Continue to chapter-ize Sigils
Reading
I started Broken Roads: Returning to my Amish Father. Right after I finish this draft update, I’m going to sit down and review a story for my writer’s group. Oh, and I took an evening this week to read up and learn a little bit about the programming language Rust. So while it’s not a whole lot of progress and it’s not like I’m reading two books a week, at least I’m stumbling along somehow.
Commitments for this week:
Continue Broken Roads
Critique at least one story for my writer’s group
Other
As I mentioned earlier this week, Postcards from Mars hit the stands. Which is really kind of exciting for me. It was something completely unplanned, and going from story submission to “Oh hai, here’s a book!” in under two months is impressive.
The Day Job has settled a bit. I’ve reached a period where I’m going to be demonstrating current progress, then doing research to see what the next steps are. So that’s going to be a little more think and a little less “stay up until 2 am banging on code”. Which - if you are a developer - you will understand that is a sad state of affairs because writing code is the fun stuff. Still, research is needed. C’est la vie.
Still considering what may (or may not) need to go on the chopping block, in terms of freeing up time for myself to do what I want to do (write, travel, work on interesting technical projects, and other fun stuff). This week was not nearly as rough as the last one, and I think that for now at least, I’m keeping things balanced. So I’m going to toodle along as usual for now.