My mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read.
Writing
Sucked… kind of? I mean, my goal was 88k, and I reached 87k. Which should make me happy, because that’s twice what I managed the week before. The thing is, I did that in three days, and then… just kind of stalled. I’ve been struggling to put “butt in chair, hands on keyboard” (BICHOK) since Saturday.
Sometimes you get the writing, sometimes the writing gets you, I guess.
The good news is that what I did get done was adding those scenes from my antagonist’s POV, and that is really working out well. So yay? I also started outlining a short story that I intend to work on for an upcoming superhero-themed anthology. I really need to get cracking on that one.
Commitments for this week:
BICHOK. Come on, Sam, you can do this.
Bang out the first draft of that superhero story. Four hours, tops.
Dream big. I want to get to 90k; my stretch goal will be 100k.
Editing
I sat in on a free Zoom class from Literature & Latte about how to use some of the Scrivener features for effective outlining. Really worthwhile. One of the things they covered was an intro into how to use collections, which I’ve never done.
So now I have a couple of collections in my doc showing my individual character arcs, my TODO list, unwritten scenes, etc. My breakdown so far:
5 scenes from the antagonist’s POV (1 unwritten)
6 from “supporting character” POV (1 unwritten)
12 from the female MCs POV (7 unwritten)
70 from the male MCs POV (14 unwritten)
4 with major “TODO” comments that need to be addressed.
As you can see, I’m down to 4 scenes left that need work. However, I wanted to be done with those by now. So that’s it. I will finish them this week, dagnabbit. One way or another…
Commitments for this week:
Keep to my established editing schedule
Finish off the TODO list
Reading
I read a lot about dreams this week. Research, not idleness. Also quite a bit about Lustre (see the next section…)
I did pick a couple of historical books from my Tower of Reading. A couple about Pittsburgh, and one about the pirates of the Outer Banks. All of which fall into the category of “research” as well as entertainment. I picked a couple because these are all fairly short (80-100 pages) which means they’re quick reads.
Commitments for this week:
Pick the next book to read.
Do my duty re: writer’s group critiques
Other
#TeamAndMore has picked up a new Emeritus member! James Copely (aka James Resoldier) had his novel The Fae Wars: Futures Past published this week. He managed to pick a #1 best seller orange tag from Amazon along the way, which is really cool!
On the non-writing side: I’ve pulled back from a couple of fairly big commitments. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but a good one. I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years volunteering for various things, political and otherwise. This is part of what I need to do to simplify my life and free up time for writing (though, ironically, that didn’t work out this week. C’est la vie.)
In the Day Job, I finally got word on what I’m going to be doing now! So there was much rejoicing. Still with the same team lead, still working with great people, but now I’m going to be helping to develop Microsoft’s Azure Managed Lustre offering. Some cool and interesting stuff. There’s also a chance that what I’ve been working on might get kind of ported over to that project, which is also cool.
So that’s it. Keep on me, help me with my BICHOK issues, will ya? I have the time, I just. Need. To. WRITE.