Tag: time management

Catching up.

Okay. Time for a quick recap.

It’s been a week and a weekend since “Late Night at the Low Road Diner” got published, and I am still really pleased about it.

I should have another short piece coming out soon, set in the After the War universe–details soon! I’m very pleased to have been invited to write for the setting, and I hope you enjoy it when it comes out.

Crit group was yesterday. I am very lucky to have my crit group; they are a thoughtful, well-informed group who manage to articulate a lot about expectations and pacing and emotional weight and signalling, and even when it’s not my story getting critted it is honestly so good to be able to hear everyone else’s thoughts.

Consider that my writerly advice, rather than going on about adverbs. Find people who can give you good critique and treasure them. I find it’s too easy to be looking at your story and seeing what you meant to put in there rather than what’s actually on the page, otherwise. (Admittedly, I once wrote a story about a couple of fictional characters come to life and completely forgot to mention anywhere in the story that that was what they were. So I’m particularly prone to blind spots. Also I once wrote a story that I forgot to mention was about fictional characters coming to life, so you may want to take any advice I offer with a grain of salt.)

Also yesterday, I finished handwriting the edits to a 13,500 word story, and am now typing them up. I’m suspecting I will need to give it another editing pass, and it’s going to end up in the nearly completely unsellable length of 15-16K words, but it will be done.

I’ve also finished my travel arrangements for Scintillation and the Surrey International Writer’s Conference, so October is going to be a very full month, but at least one that’s well organized.

CWW 2018 – final update

ETA: and today we learn that I messed up on post scheduling, for which I am very sorry.

2079 words this week, and a story revised. This brings my total for the Write-A-Thon to 8640 words, and three stories revised.

I am so very grateful to all of you for contributing, and patiently looking at my not-very-interesting updates. I think things are slowing down now a little, and I’ve got a few more things I want to talk about; for the moment, however, I’m going to do some final tidying on stories, and continue revisions, and work out what I can do for contributor’s thank-you’s for next year.

 

CWW 2018 week 5 update

Things have been frustratingly busy, but: 1991 words! This is really encouraging, especially given everything else that seems determined to happen this week. Thank each and every one of you so very much for contributing, or for reading this.

My work on story revision is going slowly, simply because there is just a lot to revise, but I think I should be on track to have it done at the end of next week.

(Again, if you’d like to sponsor before this years Write-A-Thon is over: my profile is here, and the webpage is pretty easy to navigate if you’d like to sponsor someone else. Other people have neat prizes!)

CWW update 2018 week 4

Afraid I’m pretty sick this week – vicious cold going around and it got me.

Still, 1232 words done this week. Nearly done one complete plotline for my current project!

Also, a shout-out to Asha Bardon and Shannon Fay, who helped me figure out something pretty critical about a story I’ve been struggling with. Wanted to write a more in-depth post about expectations and story formats, but this week has been mad busy. Will try and get to it later, but in the meantime, wanted to thank them before even more time slipped away.

CWW 2018 week 3 update

It’s been a very busy week, but a productive one. I wanted to take a minute to say thank you so much to people sponsoring–me or the other writers, honestly, it’s a really lovely feeling.

1077 words this week! It’s still morning, but I’m planning on outlining this evening if I get time, and I’m not going to count an outline towards my wordcount. If I do get any prose done, I’ll just roll it forward into next week.

I also completed my second story revision, so that’s two out of three done, which does give me a little breathing room. I’ve got three weeks to revise the last one, so I may try working on the novelette that I handwrote a draft of in May. (I increased the wordcount in the story by 192, but I figure I’ll just keep revision wordcount changes separate from everything else.)

In other news, the last week’s heat wave is finally breaking. I look forward to going outside and breathing without feeling like I’m trying to iron a soaking wet T-shirt.

(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 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.