Month: June 2018

CWW 2018 week 2 update

1023 words this week! It’s not as much as I’d like, but I decided to not count any of my outlining towards this week’s total, so at least it’s not all I’ve done. Also, last week I revised a story, so that’s one of the three done.

I’m slightly worried that I’m coming down with a light summer cold, so my plan for the long weekend is to largely stay inside, avoid the rather intense stew of humidity and pollen that is descending on us, and make progress on a rewrite. Hopefully what I’m feeling is just a very prolonged allergy attack and a couple of days to recover will have it tapering off.

(Again, if you’d like to sponsor: my profile is here, and the webpage is pretty easy to navigate if you’d like to sponsor someone else.)

CWW 2018 week 1 update

1238 words this week! Not a complete draft, sadly – there’s the short piece I was working on earlier, and the rest of the words went on a different piece that’s been around for a while. But I have a couple of draft zeros now; those things that are still at the level of having [[TRANSITION SCENE GOES HERE]] and [[CHECK SETTING FOR DESCRIPTION]] peppered in a few times, but are otherwise pretty solid.

I’m going to try and spend most of tomorrow working on revisions so that I can have one of the three stories I’m meaning to revise done for next week.

CWW 2018 (partial) week 1 update

686 words so far! I’m writing a very short piece, and I will actually need to edit it down to 500 words, but that’s going to happen after I get a few more details on the setting; I’ll write it all up and then edit it all down.

I’ve also started loosely editing a small piece; I’m not sure that it’s something I can properly work through in a fortnight, though, so it might not be one of my three stories edited. Will see.

A heads-up going forward; I’ve found that a lot of the time when I’m working on a first draft, I handwrite it. (This ties in to my interest in fountain pens and small notebooks.) I’m fairly used to doing this, so I know how many words on average are on a page of my notebooks, and I’ll be calculating based off that average when I don’t have time to transcribe my weekly work into a word processor before Saturday.

(Again, if you’d like to sponsor: my profile is here, and the webpage is pretty easy to navigate if you’d like to sponsor someone else.)

Summer optimism

Clarion West is a non-profit literary organization in Seattle; it runs both a six-week workshop for writers in the summer, and one-day workshops for writers throughout the year.

They also do a yearly fundraiser to help keep the workshop going and support scholarships, which is the six-week Clarion West Write-a-thon. It starts tomorrow, and I’ve signed up for it again this year; I’m aiming to write a thousand words a week for six weeks, and revise three short stories.

I’d love to help raise even a little to help keep the workshop going. If you’d like to sponsor me, here’s my page for the Write-a-thon; if you’d like to look at the other authors who are working on it, there’s a full list (137 as of this writing!) available here.

Taking stock

I may need to add another line to my side-tracker; I’ve got two pieces where someone’s indicated that they’re interested in publishing them, but it feels premature to mark them as acceptances since I haven’t gotten a contract yet. At the same time, they’re not really out in the “out and seeking responses” way that pieces that haven’t gotten a response are (and let’s be honest, that is the state a story spends most time in when it is out in the world).

I’ll probably leave it as is for now. Just a note for something to keep in mind going forward, I guess.

Another boatload of library holds for the Hugos came in, so I suspect that’s going to be a lot of my free time month, and I’m going to start entering my votes on the ballet. I’m hoping to organize my free time better this month, and actually get to a slightly weird writing project as well as the more typical ones I’m planning.