I’m still messing around with a routine, trying to find something that works. I’m sure it would help if I spent more time in my office and less time on the couch playing online solitaire or Text Twist, but it is what it is. I’ll get there eventually.
You’re going to notice a bit of difference to the format of my weekly update. Seeing as the goals I’ve set myself for the year are pretty much ongoing, I thought I’d use them as the headers for my report – sort of.
Instead of “write more” I’ll keep “new words” from my old wordage report. This is where I’ll discuss the progress I’m making on my various projects, like Knightsong (which had no progress at all this week, other than an idea I jotted down in the dead of night).
Seeing as editing is going to play a big part of my goals for the year, it’s getting its own heading. This is where I’ll report on my progress (or lack thereof). Having to be accountable for my actions might be the incentive I need to be . . . active in this area.
I’ll also have a heading for publishing, and by publishing I mostly mean what I’m submitting and whether it’s accepted or rejected. Maybe I'll even get to brag at bit. But I also hope at some point to be able to announce Blood Ties is available.
And finally, I’m going to share what I’m reading. Once upon a time, on a different blog, I talked about what I was reading, and gave little reports on the books. This lead to people offering me free books, most of which I wasn’t interested in. Let me make this clear. I am NOT going to be reviewing books. I’ll tell you the name of the book, who wrote it, and just a general “I like it enough to read it to the end” or “it’s not my cup of tea so I switched to something else.”
We’ll try this new format for the month at least and see how it goes. And if it doesn’t feel right, or becomes too tedious, then I guess I’ll have to revisit it again.
Oh, and like I said at the beginning, the goals are kind of an ongoing thing, so I’m not going to bother setting any weekly ones. It seems a little redundant.
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Wordage Report
New Words:
The first part of the week I wrote a 4500 word letter to my sister and updated my journals. Not exactly a great start to fulfilling my goals, but words are words, right? Then I found a market I wanted to try and I took an exercise from the Speculative Fiction course I took a couple of years ago and tried to turn it into a light and fluffy flash story.
It turned out okay, but it didn’t have a lot of substance. But in doing some research for it I came up with a much darker idea and ran with it. I really liked the way the new story turned out, all 850 words of it.
Despite all of my good intentions, I only did the three-minute freewritng twice last week. In the grand scheme of things, three minutes isn’t that long and I actually had fun doing them, so hopefully I’ll do more of them this week.
Editing:
Be still my heart I actually got some editing done on Blood Ties last week. According the TraxTime, the nifty little program I downloaded to keep track of how much time I spend on various projects, I spent 2 hours and 17 minutes. Not as much as I’d like, but you gotta start somewhere, right?
Publishing:
The story I submitted before Christmas was rejected, which didn’t surprise me at all. The story was good, but the timing was at fault. It was about the side effects of the cure for a pandemic virus – not something anyone’s going to want to read currently.
Not to be discouraged, I submitted the flash piece I just finished to an online magazine that had a limited window for submission. I should hear back from them by the end of the month.
What I’m Reading:
After an extended hiatus, I’m back on the bike which means my poor neglected Kindle is seeing some action again. This week it’s Shifter Shenanigans by Shelley Munro. It’s a three book set and so far I’ve only finished the first one, which was about a panther shifter, and I’m really enjoying it.
As for tree books, I’ve ventured back into the realm of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, a series by J.R. Ward. I read the first 11 books before moving on to other things, but kept buying them as they were published so I was able to pick up where I left off. Right now I’m halfway through the King and while I’m liking what I’m reading, I’m also struggling to remember events from the previous books to keep things in perspective.
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