Time and Limits

You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. You decide.
– Tony Morgan

You must vie with time’s swiftness in the speed of using it, and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow, you must drink quickly.
— Seneca

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!
— Tony Robbins

So . . . a few weeks ago I talked about the importance of setting deadlines, or goals, and coming up with an action plan to reach those goals. I also mentioned that I work better with a deadline, and what is a deadline if not a time limit?

The reason I mention this is because last week I found my writing time extremely limited and you know what? Not only did I not fall behind like I fully expected to, I was able to get my blog posts done on time, if not ahead of time.

Thursday especially was a good writing day. Knowing I had a limited amount of time to work on my serial installment, I was able to get it done (mostly) within the allotted time. Unfortunately, yesterday I had no such constraints on my time and I got nothing done (which is why this post is so late). And this is my problem. I am more productive with a time limit, but I suck at self-imposed time limits.

Take NaNo for instance. Every year I write 50,000 words (or more) in 30 days. Easy peasy. But it’s something I can only do in November. I’ve tried doing it at other times of the year, but I just can’t seem to work to a deadline I set myself. So what can I do about this?

Seriously, I’m asking you. I have no clue.

This is going to sound a little crazy, but part of my problem isn’t that I have too much to do in a given day, it’s that I don’t have enough. The less you have to do, the easier it is to put it off. Another part of the problem is that I’m a champion procrastinator. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? And when you combine the two . . . yeah, I think you see where I’m going with this.

Hmmm. Maybe I should be looking at ways to overcome my procrastination instead.

My old friend Google has been no help on this. I’ve searched variations on the theme of setting self-imposed time limits, and mostly what it came up with was how to over-come self-imposed time limits. Not what I wanted at all. And a search for setting a deadline just gave me various ways of breaking down a task into smaller components to get it done. Also not helpful.

I did find one helpful tool. It’s a website called Writing Timer. It is supposed to help you set and complete goals, and even gives you feedback and helps you create estimates on how long you should be taking.

Couldn’t hurt to try, right?

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

WORDAGE REPORT

THE WEEK IN REVIEW
The word for last week is busy.

My son-in-law’s work schedule changed, which meant my babysitting schedule changed. My granddaughter is a pretty easy-going kid, but she’s only eight, and she’s pretty active (except when she’s being a couch potato).

We have an above-ground pool, and she swims like a fish, but the weather turned on us last week. There were a lot of raining/gloomy days and without the sun the pool was a little too cool for swimming.

Fortunately the granddaughter is good at entertaining herself (she gets her imagination from her Gramie) and she loves crafts. Sometimes, if she was doing her own thing or watching TV, I was able to get some stitchery done, but not any writing. You need to focus when you’re writing, and it’s just not possible when someone is talking a mile a minute, and expects responses. Did I mention the granddaughter was a chatterbox? :-D

So lots of crafts last week, but I still managed to keep my head above water when it came to writing, which surprised the heck out of me, let me tell you.

NEW WORDS:
1976+787+273+849=3,885
UP 81 – words from last week

I guess I had better focus last week, because not only did I manage to get my posts done, they were all finished early. Even my installment for the serial. And when I say early for the serial installment, I mean I wasn’t up late finishing it like I normally am. Last week I got the bulk of it done before lunch and only had to do some touching up later in the day.

But the extra time with the granddaughter meant no extra time to write other things, not that other things have been clamoring in my head to get written. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, when it comes to my writing, and I’m closing in on a time when some decisions have to be made.

I’m a writer, not just a blogger, but the last couple of years pretty much all I’ve been doing is blogging. Okay, yeah. I do poetry, too, but you know what I mean. So I’m going to have to do a little more thinking about this, and then make some changes.

When all is said and done, I’m pretty pleased with my words from last week, especially when you take into consideration my laptop had to spend some time at the computer doctor. The daughter gave me a list of websites (from the teacher) that were supposed to help the kids keep up with their French over the summer. One of them had a virus that required a professional to get rid of.

Goals For Next Week:
Get my blog posts written, maybe consult one of my writing books for exercises to do.

EDITING:
0 hours

I did get so far as to printing out what I have of Elemental Spirit, and I even remembered to number the pages first. I don’t normally put pages numbers on my manuscripts (although I probably should) and you have no idea what a pain in the butt it is if one of the pages end up out of place.

But that’s as far as I got. Now it’s sitting in the pile on top of my typewriter. :-)

I know I said I could probably work on it with the granddaughter around, but I worked on stitchery instead. Maybe this week.

Goal For Next Week:
Start marking up Elemental Spirit.

POETRY:
Last week’s form, the Waltmarie, was kind of fun. And because it was fun, and only ten lines, I did two examples. I was talking earlier about how I’m supposed to be a writer but all I’ve been writing is blog posts, but though I’ve been writing poetry too, it’s part of the same deal.

While I’ve been writing lots of poetry, but I don’t feel like a poet because all I’ve been writing are examples of various forms. They don’t really feel like my poems. I guess my once a month poemwork counts as extra, but still . . .

I can’t remember when I last wrote a poem spontaneously. I’ve written snatches of poems, one or two lines, but not an entire poem. Except as an example of a form. There’s got to be more to life than forms!

And I gave no thought to the poetry anthology last week. Guess that’ll be a project for when school is back in session.

Goal For Next Week:
Get a new form ready to share.

CRAFTING:
The granddaughter is a chip off the old Gramie block, so there was LOTS of crafting last week. I’ll be doing a post about it for the other blog.

Monday we spent the morning making jewelry, including a pair of earrings and necklace for the daughter. In the afternoon we switched to tie-dye. It wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be, but it was done with ice, which was just plain weird.

Tuesday there was a stitch-in at the library. The granddaughter was more than welcome to come with me, but she declined, choosing to stay home and torment her Grappy instead. :-)

Wednesday the granddaughter finally expressed an interest in learning to stitch (I think more because the reward would be a sewing box of her own). She picked out one of the two super easy kits I’d bought her, but her attention wandered so much while I was trying to explain it to her, I realized that wasn’t going to work.

So I let her pick a piece of arctic fleece from my stash, and showed her how to do a blanket stitch around the edge. She was enthusiastic at first, but her stitches were really uneven. She took it home with her (and promptly ran out of thread) and when she brought it back the next day her enthusiasm had waned. *sigh* I’m going to try basting a guide line around the edge and see if that helps.

Thursday we went on a road trip to the big craft store in Peterborough. There are rumors we’re supposed to be getting one here, but . . . One of the things I checked out were things to be tie dyed (should we care to try it again) but they didn’t have a lot of stuff to be dyed, and the kits were super expensive.

I did manage to get a fair bit of the embroidery kit I’ve been working on done. I might even be able to finish it this week. It’s the first time I worked with a kit, and I have to admit, it was kind of fun. I’ll probably end up offering it up for sale in the Christmas craft show – I don’t know what else to do with it. LOL

Did nothing on the zentangle sampler, nor did I work on the bathing suit.

Goal For Next Week:
Continue on my samplers; organize jewelry supplies better.

WHAT I’M READING:
I’m still reading Stories With Bite, a collection of vampire stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These are more gothic horror than vampire tales, but it’s still interesting reading.

On the Kindle, I finished Puck’s Property, and Whistle’s War, part of the Demon Squad MC Club series by Monique Moreau, and I’ve just started Dragon Betrayed, by Ophelia Bell.

Goal For Next Week:
Keep up the good reading habits.

THE WEEK AHEAD:

Still babysitting next week. I don’t know whether to hope that the weather warms up for swimming or not. The granddaugher is happy to do many things by herself but playing in the pool isn’t one of them. Still, it would keep her from getting too bored.

I’m not a big fan of pool time. Maybe I drowned in my last life. I don’t even care for baths. I like to be near the water, on the water (in a boat), and listening to the water. I just don’t like being in the water.

But I have more crafts lined up for us, and she’s pretty good at coming up with ideas herself. Maybe we can take a walk down to the lake to look for rocks to paint.

I think Winter’s Child the serial is longer now than the original short story was. I’m actually enjoying writing it – I’ve been finding out more things about the main character, James, which makes it more interesting. And I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of influence his father’s journals have on him.

With An Elemental Spirit printed out now, there’s no reason I can’t be working away at it during the day (before and after babysitting) and in the evenings. I read a bit of the ending, and it surprised me, how good I found it. LOL Time to get this puppy finished!

Again, my reading kind of came in spurts, on the Kindle at least. I’d start a book and it would take me a while to start getting into it, but once I did I’d hate to put it down. The Arthur Conan Doyle book, however . . . I’ll stick with it, but it’s written in a classic, gothic style and to be honest it’s not really my thing. And so far, there’s only been one mention of a vampire, so that’s a little disappointing.

I’m not even trying to get back on track while I have the extra babysitting. But I am kinda pleased that I’ve been making better use of my time.

Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Pacing Yourself

Life is a marathon, not a sprint; pace yourself accordingly.
— Amby Burfoot

Pace yourself, pace yourself, pace yourself. And take time to rest. I guess if you don't rest and rejuvenate, then you harden, and I don't want to harden.
— Haley Bennett

Pace yourself in your reading. A little bit every day really adds up. If you read during sporadic reading jags, the fits and starts will not get you anywhere close to the amount of reading you will need to do. It is far better to walk a mile a day than to run five miles every other month. Make time for reading, and make a daily habit of it, even if it is a relatively small daily habit.
— Douglas Wilson

So last week I was super late with this post. Normally I write it on Saturday night and schedule it to appear on Sunday, but I was super tired and figured I’d have plenty of time to do it in the morning. And I might have, if I hadn’t forgotten how time consuming the actual wordage report part of these posts can be.

Then it took me a while to come up with a topic for this section, and then I had to hunt up appropriate quotes for the topic. And then, of course, I had to do a little research so I’d sound like I knew what I was talking about.

So what does this have to do with pacing yourself, you ask? Well, nothing really, except that I started working on the wordage report of this post yesterday, and got to thinking about how one of the advantages of reading books I’ve read several times before is that it’s easier to read just one chapter and then do something else for a while rather than gorge on the whole thing at once, and in between chapters I could do other stuff – edit for a while, read a chapter, write for a while. I figured I was finally learning to pace myself, and voila! I found my blog topic.

Which is my segue into the importance of pacing in writing. Pacing is crucial to the flow of your story and keeping the reader interested. It affects the mood of the story, allowing your reader to connect with the characters.

There needs to be a balance. If your story is too fast paced, you’ll tire out your readers. Too slow and you’ll bore them. You’ll find the balance also depends on what kind of story you’re writing. Thrillers are faster paced than character driven stories.

Descriptive passages will slow things down while dialogue and action will speed things up. Slowing down the pacing of the action at key places can build suspense, while speeding it up will have your readers on the edge of their seats. The length of your sentences and paragraphs can help control the pace as well – long ones tend to slow things down, and short ones will speed things up.

Start with action to draw the reader in, and once you have them hooked you can start filling in the details. Break up long sections of description with a bit of action or dialogue so the story doesn’t become boring. Then break up long sections of action or dialogue with some well-placed description to give your reader a breather.

To build suspense, reveal your details in small doses. Showing speeds up the pace; telling slows it down. Read your scene out loud to see where you should speed the story up and where you should slow it down

And don’t forget to pace yourself.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

WORDAGE REPORT

Considering how busy my week was, I’m surprised I got so much done. But it’s a good feeling all the same, and I’m getting the urge to write again *knock on wood*. Who knows, maybe I’ll even start something new this week.

NEW WORDS:
Blog Posts –
1316+721+246+958=3,241
Poetry
246 (included in blog posts)

Total words: 3,241

Three-minute words –
110+106+95+116+87+125+100=739

Goals For Next Week:
Return to doing a three-minute word each day, rather than doing seven of them in one day. Write something other than my three-minute words and blog posts. Maybe even try my hand at the prompt Writers Digest sent me.

EDITING:
It was a good week for editing. I finished Beet Down by Jamie DeBree, and sent it back to her. It’s always so much more fun to edit someone else’s work, and even more so when it’s a writer who knows what they’re doing. :-)

And hold onto your socks, people. I actually got some editing done on Magickal Mayhem too. A total of 53 pages worth of editing. Woohoo!

Goal For Next Week:
Keep up the good work on Magickal Mayhem.

MARKETING MONDAY:
This time I did forget about sending anything out. I honestly don’t know what my problem is there, but I do know nobody is going to buy my work if I don’t start sending it out.

Goal For Next Week:
Submit two flash stories and one poem.

TECHNO TUESDAY:
Be still my heart! I finally set up my Kindle Paperwhite. It was both easier, and harder, than I expected. Easier, because pretty much all I had to do was connect it to my WiFi and sign into my Amazon account. Harder, because my books are all just sitting there in a big lump. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off – and then I discovered they don’t actually turn off, not completely. I’m sure once I get used to it, I’ll love it just as much as my old one.

Goal For Next Week:
Do something else technical or educational (like access one of my tutorials).

POETRY WEDNESDAY:
Not only did I get my poetry post up on time, I spotlighted a new form. AND I had fun doing it.

Goal For Next Week:
Share a new poetry form and new poem.

CRAFTING:
My stitchery guild had the second needle felting class, and I came home with a totally adorable mini cactus. I have since done a second one, and now I’m working on a sansevieria. Who knew stabbing sharp needles through yarn could be so much fun?

Before I could embroider something on my tote back, I had to remove the blurred design I ironed on a week ago. It wasn’t as easy to remove as I thought it would be, and while waiting for it to dry, I started a blue pillow for the granddaughter with the dragon she drew for me on it.

Goal For Next Week:
Finish pillow. Finish sansevieria. Start embroidery on tote bag.

WHAT I’M READING:
Last week I finished Blood Magic, and then read Jewels of the Sun, Tears of the Moon and Heart of the Sea, by Nora Roberts. I also read my carrot book - Immortal Rising, by Lynsay Sands, which I felt I was entitled to because I caught up on other stuff.

Goal For Next Week:
Find something other than Nora Roberts to read.

GOAL REVIEW:
My blog posts were up, and other than last Sunday they were all on time. It’s so much easier when I start working on them earlier on the day before they’re due.

It was mostly a good week. I got my writing done, I got my editing done, I even shared a new poetry form. I didn’t submit anything for publication, but I did set up my Paperwhite finally. I figured it was stupid to be reading the same books over and over when I had 2,000 unread books sitting in a cloud waiting for me to access them.

I feel like I’m finally making a few steps in the right direction, and I can only hope that next week will be even better.

Happy writing.

The New Leaves Are Stirring

The woods are hush'd, their music is no more;
The leaf is dead, the yearning past away;
New leaf, new life
the days of frost are o'er;
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

So . . . the new leaf I was turning over is a little crumpled around the edges, but dare I say I think I’m starting to smooth it out? I mean, check it out – I got my poetry post done for the first Friday of the month. Can more posts be far behind? LOL

I ordered myself a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird and I’ve been reading it a little bit at a time for inspiration. Though it’s not a writing instruction book per se, it starts out with her talking about the writing classes she’s given and describing a few of the exercises she’s given her students. Trying to get back into the writing habit (as a start to getting into a productive writing habit) I thought, why not give them a try?

The first one had you thinking back to your childhood and describing your early school years, starting with kindergarten. Anne advised that you don’t worry about the order, just write as many details as you can remember.

It was a kind of interesting exercise. Given kindergarten was a long time ago for me I didn’t think I’d have much to say, but the more I wrote the more I remembered. Before I knew it, I’d filled a couple of pages.

I’m still fumbling a bit, trying to find a routine, but I am writing more. Finding a balance is harder than you’d think. Or maybe it’s just me.

Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

The Week Ahead…

I’m hoping to expand on the writing I did last week. And by that I mean continue the exercise from Bird By Bird. I’d probably be happy with just that, but I’d like to see about adding a daily ‘three minutes with three words’ writing prompt.

My reading has slowed down considerably, but I’d really like to pull out of the Nora Roberts black hole I seem to be in. I did start reading a book of poetry written by one of the members of my poetry group. I’m quite enjoying it, but I’m taking my time, reading only a few at a time to make it last.

And finally, I’d like to reduce the amount of time I spend mindlessly playing games. I got tired of waiting for them to come up with new levels for Solitaire Garden and reset it. I’m ashamed to admit I’m already back up to level 389. Seeing as I made a trip to Michael’s (craft store) yesterday for more craft stuff I really don’t need, I’d like to replace at least some of that gaming time with crafting time.

Wish me luck. ;-)

Bucket List

Do you have a bucket list?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Personally, I’ve never taken the time to make one, but I’ve thought about it from time to time, especially as I get older. So naturally I thought it would be interesting to do a little research about it and here’s what I found out:

Bucket lists have not been around as long as I thought. The name comes from an amalgamation of “kicking the bucket” (dying) and list, and sources pretty much agree the term was first coined in the 2007 movie of the same name. Basically, it’s a list of things you want to do before you die.

That being said, here are a few sites with suggestions to help you get started on your own bucket list:

You can find 100 ideas for your list at Life Listed

For 150 bucket list ideas that are neatly organized into categories, try Bestow

For 500+ ideas try Develop Good Habits

For 1000+ Adventure Bucket List ideas, try Bucket List Journey

And we have 10,000+ ideas from Daring to Live Fully

I wish this had been around when I was younger because I would totally have made a list and then tried to knock one item off per year.

My own take on the bucket list is first of all, don’t wait too long to start because you never know what’s around the corner. And make the list obtainable. If you’re 60 years old, it’s probably a little unrealistic to put “become an astronaut” on your list.

My final piece of advice is, have fun with it. That’s what it’s all about after all.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

New Words:

Driving Into Forever – 392
Blog Posts – 969+0+0+1312=2,281
Total = 2,673

Unless I do better on the new words on Driving Into Forever, I might have to go back to the Wednesday posts, just to get my wordage up

Editing:

I managed to get a whopping 11 ½ hours of editing time under my belt last week.

What I’m Reading:

Still on my Nora Roberts kick with the tree books. This time it was Carnal Innocence and Blue Smoke, both romantic suspense.

I kind of did extra e-reading last week, and finished Lance and Judge from the Barely After Dark series by Elle Thorne. Then I dove head first into the Pack Wars series by Vella Day - Training Their Mate, Claiming Their Mate, and Rescuing Their Virgin Mate. I’m pretty sure I’ve read the first one before, but the second and third one were definitely new to me.

Goals

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, I finished the first round of edits on Blood Ties. Feel free to throw confetti. :-D

I didn’t get it down to 100,000 words like I hoped, but it is what it is. And now I’m going to let it sit for a week or two while I focus on other things, and then I’ll read it through before starting round two. Unless, of course, I don’t find anything major to fix, in which case I’ll print it out for the final going over.

I might have made better progress on the story version of Driving Into Forever if I hadn’t been so focused on finishing the edits on Blood Ties. Hopefully I’ll do better this week.

I kind of missed doing the Wednesday blog post, especially as I skipped the Monday one on my other blog. Maybe I’ll re-think giving non-fiction a rest. Or maybe I’ll come up with a different idea for Wednesdays.

So obviously the “easing back on the reading” thing didn’t work last week. Especially on the e-reader. Those boxed sets get me every time.

This Week’s Goals

1. Finish the bare bones story version of Driving Into Forever.
2. Figure out what I’m going to do on Wednesdays and then … do it.
3. Try to ease back on the reading a bit, maybe try a little more crocheting.

Here’s to a new week ahead.

Indexing

As much as it’s difficult for this die-hard pantser to admit, there might be something to the whole plotting thing after all.

While attempting my eleventy-billionth rewrite of Driving Into Forever, it’s come to my attention that there’s a lot more going on in this story than I realized. There is a lot of stuff that should have been included that I skipped over or only alluded to. Stuff that really needs to be included now.

Seeing as it was my first NaNo (and I was pretty clueless), I looked around at all these people who spent the month of October making character sheets and detailed outlines and I figured I should probably do something similar. So what I did was, I made a list of everything I wanted to have happen in my book – that’s as good as it got, a point form list.

When it came down to the actual writing, I cherry picked from this list, writing a scene for each point. I thought I was being so smart when in fact I was being incredibly stupid. I did not do them in order and I was left with a series of scenes that were in no way connected with each other. If I ever do a piece on how not to write a novel, it will be all about that.

Anyway, I realized to make Driving Into Forever work, at the very least I need a good outline so I can flesh the story out properly. And the way I’m going to do it is by using index cards, which I should have done from the very beginning, and would have if I’d known this method existed.

For those of you unfamiliar with this method, the idea is to take a stack of index cards and write a sentence or two on each one that describes a single scene. Once you run out of scenes/ideas, you can lay them out and put them in order before you start writing.

This is especially handy if you have more than one story line going on. It has the advantage of allowing you to make sure everything is balanced. This would have come in handy with Blood Ties. It has three, sometimes four, story lines going on at the same time and it would be nice to be able to see at a glance if I was spending too much time on one at the expense of the others.

To make it easier to see what card belongs to what story line in Driving Into Forever, I’m going to use coloured cards – one colour for Hannah’s scenes, a different colour for the scientists, a third for the bad guy, and a fourth for the good guy. I’ve only got four colours, so if there’s anything else I’ll have to use coloured pens on plain white ones.

Once I’m done with the cards, it should be easy enough to weave the story lines together in a logical manner and then I can go to town on the writing. I should mention that I’m keeping the very beginning, where Hannah is driving in the fog and ends up in the Myste, but then I’m going to get rid of all previous versions including the hard copies so I can write fresh.

God help me.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

New Words:

Driving Into Forever – 0 words
Blog Posts – 867+0+651+1190=2,708
Total = 2,708

Progress on Driving Into Forever ground to a halt while I work on the index cards. Hopefully next week will show a jump in words.

And once again I didn’t do Monday’s post – I really had nothing to say. It’s still the pandemic and I’m still not going anywhere or doing anything.

Editing:

If you believe TraxTime, I spent 14 hours and 20 minutes editing Blood Ties last week – best editing week so far!

What I’m Reading:

I was moderate in my reading last week – I spent more time on it than the week before, but I’m not binging. I started with Unfinished Business, by Nora Roberts. I didn’t care much for the heroine at first, and I still think she should have woken up to smell the coffee about her father, but I did enjoy the story overall. This was followed by Cottage By the Sea by Debbie Macomber, which I really enjoyed, and I’m over halfway through Window on the Bay, also by Debbie Macomber.

I didn’t do any extra reading on the e-books, so I’m still working on Captured & Seduced, book three of Alien Shenanigans by Shelley Munro. I shouldn’t have any trouble finishing it this week, and then I’m done with the shenanigans and I’ll be looking for something new to read.

Goals

Technically I met all my goals last week. Blog posts are not on my goals list, so missing Monday’s post doesn’t count.

The editing on Blood Ties is going really well, but I gotta tell you every time I delete more than a single sentence I start second guessing myself. I’m working on the only copy of the draft I have, so anything I delete is gone forever. Scary stuff.

Realizing that there was more going on in Driving Into Forever than I realized was kind of an epiphany for me. No wonder I was having so much trouble with the previous versions. Hopefully the index card outline with get me back on track and keep me there.

It was easier to buy new yarn than to search the craft closet for my yarn stash, so I did, and I started working on a granny stitch ripple crochet afghan. To be honest, I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed crocheting and it’s a much better use of my time than gaming.

This Week’s Goals

1. Keep up the good work editing.
2. Finish the index cards for DIF and get writing.
3. Continue with my balanced reading time.
4. Continue with the crocheting instead of gaming.

Looks like I’m getting there, eh?

Electronic Slaves

This post was supposed to be my whiny little story about how my aging Kindle stopped uploading new books and how I had to go into my Amazon account and upload them manually, one at a time. And to punish me, it spontaneously rebooted itself. Twice. But somewhere along the way it morphed into something else.

I got to thinking about electronic devices, and how dependent we’ve become on them – i-Pads, tablets, e-readers, laptops, and the most insidious of all, the cell phone. Almost everyone I know has a cell phone, I’ve even seen little kids with them.

What I really find hard to understand is how attached people are to them. I even had a friend boast to me once that her whole life was on her phone. Really? I use my phone for taking pictures, texting (somewhat reluctantly), and (gasp!) as an actual phone. That’s it. No banking, no aps, no social media, no games.

Occasionally I might check my email, but I’ll fire up the laptop if I want to answer any of it. GPS might be handy, except I have nowhere to go these days. Facebook? Forget it! Those keyboards are teeny tiny and really annoying to use. I find it hard to comprehend how anyone can type actual words using just their thumbs.

People get the Kindle app for their phones so they can read books on those tiny screens. Some watch videos on their phones. I can barely read text messages, I can’t imagine trying to watch a video.

It bothers me that we’ve become so dependent on all these electronic devices. I’m the first one to admit I’d find it hard to live without my laptop. Not impossible, when push comes to shove there’s always pen and paper for writing, but difficult. My Kindle? I’d mourn the loss of all those books, but I have plenty of unread books on my bookshelves.

As for my phone, well, I have a kick-ass camera and a land line. I’m good.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

New Words:

Driving Into Forever (rewrite) – 4,176
Blog Posts – 935+456+596 +806=2,793
Total = 6,969

The wordage is creeping up, and it isn’t the blog words this week but the Driving Into Forever words.

Editing:

The TraxTime program tells me I spent 5 hours and 28 minutes editing Blood Ties last week. A little less time than the week before, but it was much more productive time.

What I’m Reading:

I still have not cracked open The Jackal, by J.R. Ward. Maybe I’ll use it as my reward book for when I finish editing Blood Ties.

Believe it or not, I only read one tree book last week, Irish Rose, by Nora Roberts. Maybe that’s why I was more productive with the writing and editing.

However, my poor, ailing Kindle got a work-out. I finished the last two books of Shifter Shenanigans - Blue Moon Dragon and Fiona’s Mates - by Shelley Munro and have started Alien Shenanigans, which is also a three-in-one deal.

Goals

Looks like I rocked all my goals last week.

I did a respectable amount of editing on Blood Ties, and I feel like I made actual progress. I powered through that pesky scene that was holding me up, adding a few hundred words in the process. The next chapter (lucky number 13) needs to be pared down, which is always more fun than adding to.

OMG! Where did all these versions of Driving Into Forever come from? There must be eleventy billion of them. And therein lies the reason this novel floundered for so long. I kept changing my mind about whether certain scenes should be included, and what order they should be in.

The section I was working on this week had three different beginnings and five different middles. And none of them transitioned logically from the first two chapters I’d already rewritten. I had to read all these scenes, decide what was important, and then work from there. Yikes!

This Week’s Goals

1. Keep up the good work editing
2. Keep working on Driving Into Forever
3. Limit my reading time.

I did it last week, let’s see if I can manage a repeat.

Excuses, Excuses

There’s another good reason (okay, maybe not a good reason, but still a reason) besides my binge reading as to why I haven’t been very productive the last few weeks.

If you read my regular blog that I post to on Mondays, you’ll know that in the fall we started a kitchen renovation. This meant, among other things, that we had to empty everything out of the kitchen so we could rip out cupboards and plumbing, etc. Most of this stuff went into plastic bins which then needed to go . . . somewhere.

The stuff I deemed unimportant (ie, that I don’t use on a daily basis) got stacked in my old office (now the hubby’s office). The stuff I used most often was stacked in and around the dining room, and the in-between stuff went into my office, including a pink wing chair from the living room.

This overcrowding of my office is not conducive to a creative atmosphere. I like things organized and that’s a little hard to do with all that extra stuff. I’d also like to rearrange my office a bit but to move anything in my office first I have to get rid of that pink chair. And to get rid of the chair I have to get rid of all the bins out of the hubby’s office so the chair can take their place.

See, the big window in my office has a southern exposure and the way things are now there’s a big chunk of the day where the sun is right in my face. This is really hard on the eyes and it makes it hard to see what I’m doing on the computer. And if I want to write anything long hand, I have to have a light on behind me.

The good news is, the counters were finally installed in the kitchen last week which means I can start reloading/organizing the cupboards. I’m hoping that with the end of the kitchen renovation in sight, there will also be an end to my lack of productivity.

Hope springs eternal.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

New Words:
Blog Posts – 898+546+421+1110=2975
Total = 2975

I did about 1,000 words better on the blog posts, but the words for the Friday post feel kind of like a cheat because most of it is an excerpt from something I’ve already written. Once I run out of NaNo novels this will probably change, but for now it feels like Friday shouldn’t be included.

Editing:
Whoopsie! I forgot to set the counter. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I did get some editing done on Blood Ties. Not every day, and not as much as I would have liked, but some at least.

Publishing:
None. And I still haven’t heard back about the last story I sent out.

What I’m Reading:
Once again, this is where most of my time went. But at least there were no late nights where I stayed up reading until my eyes burned.

I finished Blood Truth. by J.R. Ward and went on to read Where Winter Finds You, The Sinner, and A Warm Heart in Winter. The Jackal will be delivered some time this month, and then I’m done with the Black Dagger Brotherhood universe until Lover Unveiled is available in paperback. I have been so consumed with reading these books that I’m actually grateful I still have bins of kitchen stuff blocking my bookcases so I can’t reach the other books in the series because at this point I don’t think I could keep myself from starting with the first book and going through the entire series, including the ones I’ve just read.

To help pull myself out of the BDB universe, I zipped through Christmas Letters, No Competition, and All Things Considered, by Debbie Macomber – nice, fairly uncomplicated romances that had all the feels without the intense drama.

Next up I’ll be reading the anthology Troll’s-Eye View, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Goals

Last week’s goals were once again pretty much a bust. No words on anything except blog posts, no outlining, no organizing. I did get some editing done on Blood Ties at least, and I started making notes on Driving Into Forever so I can start moving forward with that, so at least that’s something.

My big goal for this week is to seriously stop messing around and get myself back on track. I’m out of BDB books and I’m going to keep those bins blocking the bookcases until I lose the urge to start the series from the beginning again. Hopefully making the switch to anthologies (I have three more after I’m done with the Trolls) will help me curb my reading addiction.

1. Spend more time in my office and less on the couch.
2. Keep up the edits on Blood Ties.
3. Limit my reading time.

It always looks so good on paper, doesn’t?

And Away We Go . . .

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.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

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.

Where There’s A Will There’s A Way

It’s the second last day of NaNo. I’m sitting around the 48,000 word mark as I type this, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to write 2,000 words in two days.

Last week was a definite challenge, I tell you what. Because of my wrenched shoulder, early in the week I couldn’t type on the lap top at my desk. I had to have it sitting on my lap because my arm wouldn’t stretch to reach it. Finally I thought to squish a pillow in the chair beside me and prop my arm up on that, but I could only type for a short while before my hand and arm were aching too much to keep going.

Thank goodness for my Neo! But even typing on the it I had to type for a bit, rest a bit, pop an Advil and repeat as necessary. I finally broke down and went to the walk-in clinic and they pretty much told me what I already knew – I pulled the muscles really bad in my upper arm/shoulder and I needed to rest them as much as possible. They even gave me a sling to keep my arm immobile . . . but did not show me how to tie it and even watching YouTube videos I couldn’t figure it out. But they also gave me some kick-ass anti-inflammatories. :-)

I’ve kind of written myself into a corner and I’m not sure how to get out of it again. Originally I was going to have Brand, my main character, acquire a special sword to rescue this female magic worker that he teams up with. However, he hasn’t met her yet and I have him paired up with a fellow mercenary – they’re like blood brothers. They’ve ticked off the religious fanatics and the sidekick is ripe for tangling with the bad guys, which will require Brand to get the sword to save him. But I still want him to face off the bad guys to save the girl, so I don’t know how I’m going to work that all in.

I do not want to turn this into a series, but I did originally have a couple of short stories using this character and I kind of wanted to incorporate some of the action from them into this book, but other than one of the fight scenes it doesn’t really work – my character has changed too much. *sigh*

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

I had a couple of 1,000 word days, and a couple of 700 word days, but thanks to the extra words I had accumulated earlier I never really fell behind. And yeah, my arm got achy from time to time but I just kept going anyway. I was not going to let a little thing like a wrenched shoulder keep me from my NaNo goal, especially since this year I was keeping up a steady pace.

The story is a real mess. I have so totally departed from my original idea that I don’t know if there’s any getting back to it. Believe it or not, I’m only now getting to the part where he meets his magical partner, so there’s plenty of story left to tell. But there are going to be a lot of kinks to work out first. Really not looking forward to editing this puppy.

Goals From Last Week

1. Edits on book flood stories – didn’t even look at the stories, but I did order myself a coil binder to make my book flood books.
2. Blog posts – despite my injury, I got them all up. And on time too!
3. More words on Firestorm – only 2,000 to go and I’m done!

Goals For This Week

1. Finish NaNo – but continue with the story.
2. Start getting the book flood stories organized.
3. Blog posts should be a given, but I’m putting them as a goal anyway.
4. Finish editing the story I plan to submit this week.

Week One and Still on Track *knock on wood*

If you’ve been reading this blog (or even my other one) for any length of time you’ll know my usual strategy for NaNo is this:
Day one: Try to talk myself out of it
Day two: Cave in and scrounge around for an idea
Day three: realize I’m already three days behind and start scrambling to catch up
Remaining days: catch up, fall behind, catch up, fall behind, pull ahead, fall behind, cross the finish line with a handful of words to spare

But this year’s NaNo is pretty much like the rest of 2020 has been – surreal. Give or take a few words, I’ve been right on target. FOR SEVEN DAYS IN A ROW! *knock on wood*

Is it because I’m older and wiser and know how to pace myself? Is the idea I settled on conducive to a steady pace? Is it because I finished Blood Ties in a flurry of words and I’m still in high gear? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t care as long as it keeps up.

Now, a lot of people talk about play lists of music to accompany their writing. I never much thought about it before. The first NaNo I won was basically accompanied by all things Star Trek. I’d sit in front of the TV late at night and watch various Star Trek marathons as I wrote.

Lucky Dog I listened to mostly Celtic music – specifically a lot of Loreena McKennitt, but a lot of miscellaneous recordings as well. Blood Ties, however, especially the last 30,000 words or so, was written mostly to the Sounds of Nature we get on our TV, which is just what it sounds like. It’s birds or rain or crickets (or whatever), sometimes with music in the background, sometimes on their own. Don’t ask me why, but listening to the sounds of nature never failed to put me in the right mindset for working on Blood Ties.

The sounds of nature does not work, however, for Firestorm. I did try in the beginning, thinking because it was also a fantasy story it would be appropriate, but it wasn’t. What I have found works well is Two Steps From Hell. I don’t know how many CDs they’ve put out, but I have a lot of them. They’re mostly instrumental – think epic soundtrack – but it just seems to go with my story.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been spending a lot of time writing in the living room – it has a CD player that holds five CDs at a time, whereas in my office I have to get up every time the CD ends (unless I want to listen to it over again).

Anyway, the story is moving along nicely, even if it’s starting out in a different direction than I anticipated. But that’s just one of the joys of being a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants instead of using an outline). My main character (who needs renaming badly) is a little different than I expected. He’s not as angry for one, although that may change. Or it might change during editing. You know, a few years from now. ;-)

Meanwhile, the story started meandering down a side path I didn’t like, so it being NaNo and all I just stopped and started the next scene back a few pages and sent it where it should have been. It’s still not perfect, but it got the story moving again, and that’s what counts.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

As I mentioned above, I’m pretty much on track to where I should be. As of the typing of this, I’m at 13,322, which is only 11 words shy of where I should be by the end of the day. And I think it’s important to note that during this time we’re having our kitchen renovated, so I spent a good part of last week unloading the cupboards so they can be ripped out. Who knew such a tiny kitchen had such a lot of stuff in it??

Goals From Last Week

1. Edits on Blood Ties – I actually did get some editing done, not as much as I’d hoped to, but you have to start somewhere.
2. Blog posts – even though this one is kind of late (I spent yesterday afternoon up in Peterborough so the evening was spent on Firestorm instead of this post) I still got all my posts done last week.
3. NaNo – so far I’m feeling really good about this year’s NaNo (*knock on wood*)

Goals For This Week

1. Continue working on edits for Blood Ties
2. Get all my blog posts done
3. Try and pull ahead with words on Firestorm

Two Steps From Hell - Never Give Up On Your Dreams

The End Isn’t As Nigh As I Thought

So a funny thing happened on the way to the smack down between Jessica and Anakaron . . .

I find using my lap top to write on kind of problematic at times. The problem being, it connects to the internet. So instead of just pausing to think about the next few words, I’ll start playing solitaire, or bubble shooter, or check my email, or surf around . . . you get the idea.

This is why I prefer using my Alphasmart Neo for heavy duty writing. The Neo is great in that there’s no bells or whistles or internet to distract me so I get lots of writing done. But the downside to the Neo is that it’s hard to go back and make changes.

You only see four lines of text and to scroll back up is a pain in the butt. Plus the only way to delete text (that I know of) is to use the backspace key. There’s no mouse, so you can’t highlight blocks of text to move or delete. The easiest way to make a lot of changes is to upload the file to a document on the lap top and change it there.

I worked on three separate scenes this week, and in each case they kind of wandered off into oblivion. I had to re-write their endings to get them back on track and to do this I’d upload them from the Neo to the lap top to determine where I started to go wrong. Once I figured out where I needed to rewrite, I’d go back to the Neo and start from that point and finish the scene.

So . . . while I only have 3,600 words to show on Blood Ties for the week, I probably wrote about 5,000 and deleted 1,400 of them.

And speaking of deleting . . . I did a lot of deleting when I was researching for last week’s non-fiction post. That’s one of the disadvantages of doing research on the internet. It may be quicker and easier, but there’s just so much information out there. You get pages and pages of data, and then you have to distil it down into just a few paragraphs.

It was almost easier in the old days when you had to get your research from books or magazine articles. Instead of copy/pasting vast amounts of information into a document file, and then going back and deleting all the repetitions, you jotted down pertinent facts, maybe highlighting a photocopy or two.

Yeah, I know. There’s no reason I couldn’t do it that way. And I have a pretty good reference library myself. But the internet’s right at my fingertips and it makes research so much quicker. It’s just the distilling down that’s time consuming.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

Editing – 0 hours, 0 pages
Maybe this week will be better

Research – 4.5 hours

Blood Ties – 3,612 words
Not bad, but it could have been better

Blog Posts – includes the post for my regular blog, but not the prompt story.
423 (regular blog)+ 946 + 550 = 1,919 words total

Weekly Prompt – 547 words

Total Words – 6,078

New Prompt
The old photos made her conscious of her age, of how much time had passed – and of what an interesting life she’d had.

Goals From Last Week:
Blood Ties is over 100,000 words! And while I had hopes of finishing it last week, The muse just wasn’t co-operating. But I’m getting closer, and that’s the main thing. Right?

Last week’s prompt still didn’t do anything for me, but I found a different prompt that did (as you know if you saw the prompt story. And a truly weird little story it was.

No editing again, big surprise there, and just a little research. I love full moons, hence the Wednesday post about them. And I’ve got enough left over for this week too.

Goals For This Week:
1. Blood Ties, Blood Ties, Blood Ties! I feel like I’m taking one step forward and two steps back, but I swear I’m going to do my best to get this done!
2. It took me a while to find this week’s prompt, so hopefully I’ll feel inspired to write a story using it.
3. Who am I kidding with the editing? But I need to get a jump start on the research for the next non-fiction series.

And there’s what I’ll be up to this week. How about you?

A Funny Thing Happened . . .

I missed the Monday blog post on my other blog, but other than that my week was going pretty well until I got to Thursday and realized I didn’t have my prompt story done yet. So what did I do instead of working on the story? I spent the afternoon with the daughter and granddaughter up in Peterborough shopping. And then we went out to dinner.

And furthermore, I don’t regret a bit of it. LOL

To be honest, I had a lot of trouble with last week’s prompt and I finally gave up and started looking at other prompts. Nothing that came up in any of the generators turned my crank, so then I started lonking at some of my prompt documents. These were prompts I copy/pasted into a document because I liked them, just not enough to work on right away. The prompt I came up with was: Only the very oldest people remembered a time when humans could see in colour

Once I figured out the basics – how to tell the story, who was telling it, etc. – I wrote it pretty quickly. It ended up around 400 words and I put it up on my blog, scheduling it to appear at regular time on Friday. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

And then a funny thing happened. I realized I really liked this story. It was pretty darned good, if I do say so myself. I liked it so much I thought of where I could send it for publication. So Friday morning, before it appeared, I checked the submission requirements of the e-zine I wanted to send it to and they do not accept stories that have appeared on a personal blog, even ones like mine that have a readership of eight people.

So I deleted the post and later that day I wrote a new story from a new prompt. Don’t get me wrong, I liked that story too (even though it started to run a little long) but not enough to think about submitting it somewhere.

This is actually a really big step for me. I normally just accrue big piles of stories (and poetry) – I write them and then I don’t really do anything with them. I remember I did in the beginning, you know, back in the dark ages when I first started to write. I optimistically sent stuff out on a regular basis and I’ve got the rejection slips to prove it. I don’t think it was discouragement from being rejected that made me stop, I think it was just my focus shifted to other things.

But I’ve been writing flash fiction for several years now and it some of it isn’t half bad. I don’t know why I don’t do anything with it. And the prompt stories – I churn them out and because they’re just blog exercises I don’t really do anything with them either. All it would take is a little polish and some of them would be pretty good too.

Maybe submitting this story, whether it’s accepted or not, will be the start of a new trend. One can only hope.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

Editing – 0 pages
Oh me, oh my. I’m starting to see an unfortunate trend here.

Blood Ties – 1,259 words
I’m starting to gain a little momentum, but it still seems to be a steep upward slope.

Blog Posts – includes the post for my regular blog, but not the prompt story.
0 (regular blog)+ 866+ 388 = 1,254 words total

Weekly Prompt – 402 + 819 = 1,221 words

Total Words – 3,734

New Prompt
I think this prompt comes from Seventh Sanctum but I’m not sure.
This story involves a lonely sprite, a campsite, a dead body, a tea cup, and an old grudge.

Goals From Last Week:
If you read my regular blog, you’ll notice I didn’t have a post up on Monday. I live in a quiet town and don't really get out and do much, so I really didn't have anything to talk about.

Blood Ties is inching its way along, but at least it’s still moving. Maybe there’s hope for me getting this done in time for Christmas yet. Cross your fingers.

I already explained about the prompt snafu at the beginning of this post. I just need to clean that first story up a bit before sending it out into the wild. But two prompt stories in two days – way to go me! LOL

I didn’t so much as forget about the editing, I just never got around to finding something new to edit.

Goals For This Week:
1. I guess by now it goes without saying that I need more new words on Blood Ties. By hook or by crook I’ll get that book done yet!
2. New prompt story – and preferably using the prompt I picked out for the week. For sure I want to start it earlier in the week instead of waiting until the last minute.
3. I’m planning on doing an anthology of flash stories for this year’s book flood book. Maybe I could start editing the stuff I want to include in that – killing two birds with one stone.

And there’s what I’ll be up to this week. How about you?

Down the Slippery Slope - Backwards

Well, the good news is that I managed to disable my track pad again. The bad news is that it really didn’t make much of a difference. I back slid into my old habits of reading too much and gaming too much. *sigh*

While I’m a little disappointed in myself, in my defense I was extra tired and head-achy last week. And I don’t know where my energy disappeared to, but I suspect it was self isolating itself.

But still, I did manage to get my blog posts up on time, and I really should get credit for that, especially the prompt story. I didn’t get it written ahead of time, and I did not budget my time wisely on Thursday and ended up staying up way too late to get the story done. The worst part is I don’t think it was worth it.

I’m not a fan of zombies or zombie stories in the first place, which is probably why I didn’t get it done earlier in the week. That being said, the story itself started to get away from me and I can see making a much longer story out of it in the future.

This is not what these prompts are about. They’re supposed to be just quick little fun exercises to get the creative juices going. But the prompt stories that I could make an actual story out of are starting to pile up. We’re talking a couple of anthologies worth. You know, when I have the time (and energy) to go back and work on them.

Also Thursday night, I attended a socially distant meeting of my poetry group. Six of us met down on the waterfront in the picnic table free picnic shelter. We brought our own beverages, chairs, masks, and poetry. It was actually kind of fun.

We shared our poetry and then chit-chatted until it started getting dark. I found it comforting that of the six of us, three (including me) were having trouble finding inspiration to write. But not only were the other three still writing, one even put together a slim volume of poetry. Kudos to her!

Normally I’d come home from a poetry meeting all fired up with creativity. Not so this time. While it was great to see my fellow poets, my poetic muse still seems to be self-isolating. But hopefully, like the COVID-19, this won’t last forever.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

Editing – 0 hours/pages
Yeah . . . this time I didn’t even look at my editing stuff.

Wandering Wizards – a few words
I did add a few words, but not really enough to matter. And I kicked around the idea of a new title for it – one that makes better sense.

Blog Posts – includes the post for my regular blog, but not the prompt story.
481 (regular blog)+ 716 + 306 = 1,503 words total

Weekly Prompt – 803 words

Total Words – 2,306

New Prompt
This week’s prompt is from Writing Exercises and Prompts
Your spouse has left you but forgotten to take his/her credit card. You're not poor so how would you use the card in ways that would really upset your ex?

Goals From Last Week:
Well, my word counts were about the same, for everything except Wandering Wizards that is. I kind of stalled at the scene I’ve been working on because I started thinking it was dragging out too long, but that’s what edits are for, right?

You’ll notice I added the source for my weekly prompt this week, and I’ll keep doing it. I thought you might want to try generating a prompt or two of your own.

Still no edits, and I still haven’t made a decision on the kanban board. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but I think it would be a better idea if I was actually getting stuff done.

Goals For This Week:
1. Words on Wandering Wizards. It would be really nice to be able to write ‘The End’ before the summer is over, but I won’t hold my breath.
2. New prompt story – and maybe some new sources for prompts. These are supposed to be quick and easy but they’re getting away from fun exercises and seem more geared to actual stories lately.
3. Decide whether I’m going with the kanban board or the dry erase, or just forget the whole thing.
4. Seriously, if I’m not going to edit I need to take it off my list.

And there’s what I’ll be up to this week. How about you?

Thinking Is Not Writing

When I started this post yesterday, I started getting all grumbly with myself because despite all my good intentions I was going to have another week with a zero word count. It’s not that I didn’t want to write, I just kept getting derailed or distracted and one of the many pitfalls to having too much time on your hands is there’s always “later” to do things. So I didn’t get any writing done although I did think about it a lot, but as you know, thinking isn’t writing.

I wasn’t even spending all that writing time reading, like I was doing at the beginning of the year. I’m really enjoying the books I’m reading right now, both the tree book and the e-book, but I’m taking the time to savour them. Sipping the stories instead of gulping them down, as it were.

It was early enough in the day that I figured it was time for a reading break, but then I thought why not write instead? I had no problem taking writing time for reading, it only follows that I could take some reading time for writing if my lack of progress was bothering me.

Which is exactly what I did, and I wrote close to a thousand words. So take that procrastinating and distractions!

However, I’m not particularly proud of the words I wrote last night. I’m having to do a transition scene in Wandering Wizards and I tend to flail around a bit with them. Once I get my group to the shrine I can get the action going again, but the journey from one disaster to the next is kind of dragging. Of course that’ll be fixed in the edits, but right now it’s kind of annoying.

But… I also had a good idea for a bit of fore-shadowing, so I wrote a brief scene for that. It’ll need to be expanded, but it killed two birds with one stone: first, the foreshadowing, and second, it touched base with the wizards down south who really don’t have much to do other than wait around until they’re needed. Hmm. Maybe they need to be a little more pro-active as well.

As well as continuing to work on Wandering Wizards (too bad I can’t be as single minded about that as I can about reading) I also have a poetry reading coming up on Thursday evening. Seeing as February is so dark and dismal I figure I’ll see if I can come up with a selection of light hearted poems. I tend to write three kinds of poetry – humorous poems, depressing poems, and poems written to forms. It’ll be interesting to see if I can come up with enough humorous poems to fit the bill.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

Wandering Wizards – 892 words added

Weekly Prompt – 327 words
It turned into a weird little dystopian, post-apocalyptic story that didn’t really go anywhere and I had no great urge to turn it into something.

Total words - 1219
Not great, but better than I've been doing lately, right?

Prompt

Use this as your first line:
Cruelty is a sleeping boy but art was a bleeding man.

Happy Writing!

Empires Rising and Falling

I actually got some writing in last week. Real writing I mean, something besides blog posts and the prompt story. And how did I do this? By choosing to ignore my email and Facebook in the morning.

For me the best time to write is between breakfast and babysitting, you know, after I finish a whole list of other stuff. Suddenly it occurred to me that empires wouldn’t rise or fall if I failed to check my email first thing, same goes for Facebook. Instead I used that time to write.

That worked for pretty much two days in a row. Monday and Tuesday I spent the time between breakfast and babysitting writing my blog posts for those days, and Friday I had grocery shopping and a coffee date.

But I really think I’m onto something here. What if I got my blog posts done the night before, like I used to, and waited until later to check my email and Facebook?

It sounds good in theory, let’s see what happens when I put it into practice.

Prompt of the Week

Well this is annoying. I really, really like The Story Shack for generating story prompts, but every time I tried to click on it yesterday I got a security error and I couldn’t find a way around it. I’m kind of bummed about it. If I’m ever able to access it again, I’m going to download a bunch of prompts, just to have them handy.

So, for this week at least I’m going to have to find a different prompt site. First I tried a site called The Plot Generator. There were a lot of options for generating ideas and I tried Create a Paranormal Romance Plot in Seconds and Create a Smelly Troll Plot in Seconds. The resulting prompts were okay, so I saved them, but not quite what I was looking for.

Next up was the site called Writing Exercises and Prompts where I clicked on Quick Plot Generator, Random Plot Generator, and Random Scenario. Of the three, I liked Random Plot Generator the best. It gives you some details to work with, but not as much as I got from the previous site.

On to Springhole which is more geared to RPG, but it was still kind of fun. I tried the Creepypasta & Supernatural Horror Plot Creator, the Fairytale Plot Generator, and the Really Random Plot-o-Tron - Medieval-esque Fantasy Edition. While they were fun, they still weren’t quite what I was looking for. I want something quick and easy, so I’ll definitely go back to this one when I’m in the mood for something longer.

Finally, I tried the Seventh Sanctum writing generators. These generated ten choices at a time. I tried the romance story generator with fantasy as the category and received ten interesting ideas. Then I tried the writing challenges generator and got ten more interesting choices.

Are you starting to see why this blog post was late today? :-D

In the end, I went with the random plot generated by the Writing Exercises and Prompts site. It gave me:
Main character: A woman in her early thirties, who is very reckless.
Secondary character: A man in his early twenties, who is very compassionate.
Setting: The story begins in a church crypt.
Situation: Someone is being blackmailed.
Character Action: Your character has to do some quick thinking to keep ahead

Feel free to play along, or if you prefer, try out one of these generators on your own.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

So…I almost finished the edits I’ve been working so diligently on and then I came to the part that prompted me to go back and edit in the first place. And then I dithered for a bit thinking I might have to make a map after all because my group was supposed to meet someone at this shrine, and I had no idea where the shrine was in relation to where my group was.

Then a light bulb went off over my head.

The shrine scene kinda bugged me and it suddenly dawned on me that this book hasn’t been published yet. I can go back and change anything I want. And trust me, I want!

So now I’m backtracking 30 pages or so to get rid of a couple more scenes I didn’t like. One of them I might be able to change enough to save, but I still feel like for every step I’m taking forward I’m taking two back. Am I ever going to get this book finished?

I hope so, because I’ve become so fixated on it that I can’t seem to focus on any other writing. And as I was falling asleep the other night I suddenly had all these ideas invade my brain for this science fiction series I came up with while I was still in high school. I laid all kinds of groundwork for it but eventually abandoned it, mainly because I just wasn’t mature enough as a writer to handle it. Then I wrote the first book for NaNo one year, but there were several sticking points I needed to overcome before I could give the series a go.

The notes I made the other night not only clear up the sticking points of that series, it also connects with my Elemental series (which is set further into the future) and I’ve figured out which of the three possible endings for the Elementals makes the best sense. Woot!

But first…Wandering Wizards must get finished!


Prompts of the Week

Last week’s prompts marked the end of my jar of prompts. It was a good idea, but it lacked proper execution. So until I come with better prompts for the jar (feel free to send me any of your own) I’m going to change things up a bit.

I have a large book I bought through Reader’s Digest called The Family Word Finder. Yeah, it’s pretty much just a big ole hardback dictionary, but it also contains the odd quote and word origin. Anyway, I’m going to pick five words at random, and the challenge is to use all five of them in whatever you write – poem, story, opinion piece, whatever.

For the second prompt…remember last year I talked about how the writing group I was part of used Archetype cards as prompts for some freewriting during our meetings? Well, I bought myself a deck and each week I’m going to pull one at random and share it with you for the second prompt.

And if these don’t work…well, I guess I’ll just have to come up with something else. :-D

Prompt One

Forestall
Review
Applause
Vocalize
Govern

Prompt Two
The Archetype cards are great for creating characters, but you can also create a story (or poem) using the attributes in the abstract. And really, you have three choices here: just the light attributes, just the shadow attributes, or a combination of both.

Child Eternal
Light Attributes: Determination to remain young in body, mind, and spirit. Ability to see things with fresh eyes.
Shadow Attributes: Inability to grow up and be responsible. Extreme dependency on others for physical security.

And remember, you don’t need to spend a lot of time on these, they’re just meant for fun. But if it turns out you like what you’ve written, then by all means keep going and turn your exercise into an actual story or poem or whatever.

Tempting Fate

Serves me right for bragging. Last Tuesday I was all about how the sun was shining again and how awesome I was and how I had my writing mojo back. Ask me how I did the rest of the week. Go, on, I dare you.

Not so great. I got about ten more pages edited on Wandering Wizards and then I came to a spot that needed an infusion of Jessica and Dominic and ground to a halt.

It took me all day Saturday to write, and post, my prompt stories.

Yesterday it was warm and sunny, but I had charge of an active pre-schooler all day which is not exactly conducive to getting anything done.

Today it’s back to being cold enough for a coat and rainy enough that if I had rain boots I’d be wearing them. Also, for the next few days I’ll still be looking after the granddaughter when she’s not in pre-school.

*sigh*

The good news is, after Friday I’ll have five babysitting free days in a row. Almost like a vacation, for sure I’ll be able to spend some quality time with my lap top/Neo/notebook.

But let’s not say that out too loud – we wouldn’t want to tempt fate by putting a jinx on it.


Prompts of the Week

Prompt One
While preparing your garden at the beginning of spring, you find the blueprints for your house buried in the earth. When you pull it out and examine it, you find that there is a room in the blueprint that doesn’t exist in your house. Both disturbed and intrigued, you set off to find the missing room. Write what happens next.

Prompt Two
Write a love story about the dish and the spoon from the classic nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle.” How did they meet and why did they decide to run away together? Will their relationship last?

You don’t need to spend a lot of time on these, they’re just meant for fun. Take 5 minutes to think about it, then write for 10 or 15 minutes. And if it turns out you like what you’ve written, then by all means turn your exercise into an actual story. You can find these prompts, and others like them, at Writer's Digest .

Progress! I Have Progress to Report!

Words from sprints
Monday – 526 Wandering Wizards
Tuesday – 675 Magic II
Wednesday – 445 Magic II
Thursday – 731 Magic II
Friday – 529 Magic II
Total: 2,906
Blog Posts: 1797
Editing: 1 hour, 5 minutes

I wasn’t sure about breaking down the word sprints (and FYI, it’s only a word war if you’re writing against someone; if you’re just writing against the clock then it’s a word sprint) but I found the range of wordage kind of interesting.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking pretty much the same thing I am. Wow, 2900 words for a whole week isn’t really that great. But it’s better than I’ve been doing all year, so shut up. Plus a word sprint is 30 minutes, so those daily totals are for 30 minutes of writing each.

The weekend was supposed to be for editing, and as you can see I only did a little over an hour’s worth of it. I’ve been trying to adjust to a new medication and it seriously knocks the stuffing out of me for at least a day, which was Saturday, and then Sunday I kind wrote over 2300 words (which will be added to next week’s total) instead of editing.

What can I say? The ending of the new WIP I’m working on came to me as I was falling asleep Saturday night and it was good enough that I remembered most of it in the morning.

And you notice I’m calculating my editing by time spent instead of pages finished? It just seemed to make sense. And I have to admit to being a little curious as to how much time I spend editing something. I’ll bet the total time when I’m done will staggering.

To help in this I downloaded a nifty little program called TraxTime. With it you can log the amount of time you spend on your different projects, whether it’s writing or editing. Not only will it keep track of each day’s progress, it’ll keep a running total for you too and you can generate reports, if you’re so inclined. You can try it yourself for free for 30 days, just go HERE  and if you want to keep it, it’s only $39.00.

I hope you also noticed I fixed my progress bars to the right. As you can see, I took Wandering Wizards all the way back to the beginning. I’m combining both the old words and new as I see fit, which is going to make keeping track of the new words a little problematic. One of my problems last week was that I wrote down my daily word counts, but forgot to make note of which WIP they were for, so when it came to updating my progress bars I was a little uncertain. However, I’ve made a chart to fill in on a daily basis, so hopefully that won’t be a problem any more.

I would have liked to have added more words to Wandering Wizards last week, but what can I say? Sometimes it’s nice to work on something completely different, and the words just seem to be coming fast and furious for Magic II. So fast, in fact, I kind of wish I could have saved it for NaNo – I would have rocked NaNo with it. Oh, well. There’s always Magic III. ;-)

This week: carry on and keep writing!

Baby Steps

Wow, I wasn’t kidding a couple of weeks ago when I said it was going to be hard to break the solitaire addiction and do more writing. It’s been really hard.

I’ve made a little bit of progress in the addiction part of it – I’m only at risk if I already have my lap top open. I won’t boot it up just to play solitaire (like I was before). Now if I need to relax my mind and the computer is shut down I’ll pick up a book and read a chapter instead. However, it’s still really hard to avoid solitaire when I have my lap top open, I still just naturally default to it.

It would be nice if I could just close the lid of the lap top and pick up a book when I feel the urge to play (kind of like drinking a glass of water when you feel the urge to snack), but if I do that with the new lap top I have to wait for it to boot up and then sign in again. My old lap top I could just close it, it would go to sleep, then I’d open it and it’d wake up at the exact spot I left it.

You might think that reading isn’t much better than playing games – it’s still not writing – but I’m able to control my reading (mostly) and oftentimes it seems to inspire me to pick up a pen or turn on the Neo.

The good news is, the site I go to for solitaire has a bunch of different games but I’ve played them so much they don’t present much of a challenge anymore. Would it be too much to hope that this particular addiction has just about run its course?

As for getting back into the writing habit…you might recall I mentioned my whirlwind visit to New Brunswick a few weeks ago. I adjusted so easily to New Brunswick time when I was there that I kept to those hours once I came home again – I’m going to bed earlier and getting up earlier.

This means extra time in the morning for writing – theoretically at least. But it also means less time at night. Nine times out of ten you’d find me typing away between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., getting a blog post or two finished to be scheduled for the following day. Now that I’m going to bed around 11, I don’t get that 2 hours so I end up using my early morning writing time for blog posts and email, etc.

I have managed some writing in the afternoons, a few (very bad) poems and I’ve been working on a couple of short stories. But even when I do make it to my office after babysitting I’d rather read than write. And forget sitting outside – outside is just too distracting what with its trees, and birds, and nature and all.

So this week’s focus will be to get my blog posts done earlier in the day (afternoons) so that I can do other writing in my big chunk of time in the mornings (usually at least two hours). And I think one of the ways to do this will be to spend more time in my office or at the dining room table, and less time in the recliner.

Wish me luck – I think I’m going to need it.

Flashing My Stuff

Short Fiction - 593
Long Fiction - 2295
Poetry - 324
Total Words - 3212
Editing Hours - 0
Paragraphs of Notes - 5

Well, if there’s one good thing about the heat wave we’re under right now, it’s that it makes it easier to work in my office. Not the new one, the old one. It’s on the north side of the house with a big tree in front of the window, which means it’s nice and cool in the morning. And I actually am finding it easier to get into the routine of writing in my office first thing in the morning.

Except this morning. Being cooler also means the office is dimmer, and this morning I needed some light to energize myself. So here I am in the living room with the view of the deck, and a fan oscillating in my direction. However, the downside of using the fan is that it tends to make my throat sore and exacerbate the cold I came down with at the end of last week. And though I started taking my magical herbal cure at the first sniffle, this cold quickly surpassed the herbs’ ability to combat it. This has been one heck of a year for colds for me

I spent a lot of time on poetry last week. If you’ve ever written poetry, then you should know it can be every bit as time consuming as a short story. The poem I wrote for the Brazen Snake Books prompt was easily twice as long as the finished product. I kept creating and discarding verses, and changed the focus of the woman’s ire. Click on the Brazen Snakes link above if you’re curious about the completed poem.

I did not, however, finish the story I’m writing for my picture prompt. Finding the balance for flash fiction can be a tricky thing. On the one hand, you want to tell a complete story, but on the other hand, you want to keep it short. While I really like my story idea, it keeps spiralling out of control. Typically, anything under 2,000 words is considered flash fiction, although it’s more often under 1,500 words. I try to keep mine around 1,000 words.

I read a lot of flash fiction, and in fact I get a flash story delivered to my in-box every week day morning. It’s usually the perfect length to read while I’m having breakfast. And while I’ve read some great stories, I’ve also read some disappointing ones. Some people just don’t seem to get the concept of flash fiction and I have to wonder who they know that they’re able to get published.

A list is not flash fiction. An extended paragraph to set up a punch line is not flash fiction. An article, sermon, or obituary-like report on someone’s life is not flash fiction. And whenever I receive one of these in my in-box, I think I should try submitting a few stories to them because obviously they’re hard up to fill their space.

So what is flash fiction? Good flash should follow the same rules as any other fiction, whether it be long or short. It should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should have a point, a reason for it having been written. The best flash should linger in the mind long after the story has been read.

Flash is a great way to hone your craft. It teaches you to be succinct, to the point. Every word must have a purpose. You strip off the flesh and get to the bones of the matter. Out of necessity, the cast of characters will be limited and there will be no space to go into a lot of detail about them, their nature will be shown by what they say or do.

And there are many benefits to writing flash fiction. Your longer writing will become tighter. It will help establish a regular writing habit - it can feed your soul when you don’t know what to write about. Because it’s brief you can indulge in different genres or aspects you’ve never thought of trying before - romance, suspense, humour - without having to worry about keeping it up for pages and pages. It gives you the opportunity to let your imagination out for a stroll.

And as an added bonus, there’s a growing market for flash fiction. And let’s face it, who couldn’t use a little extra money? ;-)