Writing Accountability

Week 2/52

For the past half year or so, I’ve been putting up daily writing accountability posts on Facebook. In them, I covered three major commitments I made: to write, edit, and read. Telling people what I’m working on (or not) has been very helpful to me, so it’s something I want to continue.

I’ve decided to keep doing them in a slightly different way. We have a daily progress (#BICHOK) post that a bunch of people in the Facebook WriterDojo group use for accountability. I’m already posting about my daily activity there, so mirroring that elsewhere seems… redundant. So instead of posting on Facebook daily, I’ve decided to do an end-of-week summary post here on Substack.

So, without further ado…

Writing

I wrote a flash fiction story (“Callback”) as part of a challenge. I’ll talk more about that in a blog post scheduled for tomorrow.

This week I need to spend some time finishing up "Down Among the Dead Men". I have a couple of other finished stories that I need to review, revise and get into circulation now that we’re in the new year.

Editing

Back in 2019, I finished the first draft of a novel titled Sigils. I meant to edit it this past year but got completely sidetracked. So this year I’m committed to getting structural editing & rewrites done.

This week I finished the initial re-read and outline for "Sigils". I found myself laughing out loud at a few passages. I’m hoping that’s evidence that I wrote something decent, at least in places. This week I'm going to work on doing more extensive scene deconstruction and analysis. I've got ~ 90 scenes total right now, so I'll target 12-13 scenes daily.

Reading

I finished Howard Street Hauntings and Other Ocrakoke Stories this week. Good inspiration for stories of dangerous space lanes, daring rescues, and haunted spaceships.

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This week I've started reading Crow Moon by Cedar Sanderson. I’ve only finished the first story (“The Honeymooners”) but really enjoyed the tale, particularly because it had a rather unexpected twist.

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Other

I'm caught up on the WriterDojo podcasts and have started listening to "Your Next Draft" by Alice Sudlow. I like her stuff, and for me, it's really timely. She's talking about outlining, structural editing, and scene evaluation. Which is precisely where I am now with my work on Sigils.

I’ve done a couple of interviews this week unrelated to writing. If you’re interested in hearing my story about what it was like to quit nicotine, you can check out my interview on the Kill The Can podcast. I also appeared on a “Call to Care” show on iHeart radio here in Pittsburgh to talk about TryLife, a pregnancy and family resource center I work with.

Overall, I’m working on getting back into a routine now that we’re past the holidays. That means trying to write daily (including Substack posts) and focusing on my editing. Tune in next week to see how well I do :)