My mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read.
This week has been… eventful. Read on.
Writing
Last week, I said, “I have a couple of short-ish (partially completed) novels that I want to revisit and re-outline”. Well, after a long walk and some consideration, I decided that I’d really rather work on the prequel to Sigils. The working title for that book is An Understanding. I’ve shared a bit or two here about that story here previously. So that’s where I’ve been over the past week.
At least, when I can. The outline is about 3k words right now, but is moving along nicely. I can see how the scenes break out, which is nice. As I’ve said elsewhere, but outlining, I’m doing my best to front-load most of my discovery writing. So that when the times comes to sit down and put words on a page, I’ll know what’s going on, what my goals are for a scene, and I can simply enjoy writing it.
I’ve been mulling over “Walk Into Light” as well this week. While I like what I’ve already got down, I think I am going to shift the POV in a significant way that’s going to help introduce some more parallels in the story. We’ll see if that works. I’ve got a free week coming up in August that I plan to use for banging this one out.
Editing
Nada. Not even any critiques.
Reading
Mission to Methonē, then Annoyed with Lloyd and on to The Cunning Man. Yeah, same as last week. Not a whole lot of reading time recently.
Other
The Day Job has continued to occupy a lot of time and brainpower. One of the hard parts about this particular aspect of my job is working with partial or unclear information. At this point, it’s 50/50 whether some odd software change on our part is an issue, or the customer’s got something wonky in their networking setup. I’m on record as noting that the problem is always DNS, so you can guess where I’ve put my money down on the betting table.
Meetings have continued. As mentioned, two board meetings last week, plus assisted with an organizational meeting Monday. We also hosted a church fellowship at our house on Sunday, which pretty much took over the entire weekend in terms of preparation. We’ve also been getting together with friends to play TTRPGs one evening a week, which is fun, but also takes up time.
Unfortunately, what’s really sucked up my time, energy, and emotions this week has been dealing with identity theft. On Monday, we received an unexpected packet of loan paperwork in the mail. It seems that someone managed to match my name, date of birth, and SSN and used all that to apply for a couple of loans in my name.
I think we caught it in time to nix everything, thankfully. Even with that, though, it’s been a busy couple of days following various checklists to make sure that everything is locked down so whoever it is can’t use my data in other harmful ways. Shout out to USAA for having a really good one-page “take these steps now” document to help me get through the first day. I’m going to file a police report this morning, then I have phone calls to a bunch of state and federal government agencies to make sure that we’re all good.
So that’s me. A little writing, not much else, and a lot of stress. Hopefully I’ll be back next week to tell you the outline’s chugging along and everything is hunky-dory with the whole identity thing.