Category: Goals (Page 5 of 5)

Like almost everyone else, we’ve been under a stay-at-home order, although that’s being eased a little as we move into May.

As someone who normally works from home, I think my biggest challenge has been, that even though some restaurants are open for delivery and take-out, I have missed the ability to get out of the house to eat in a restaurant.

On a positive note, Iast weekend was story fifty-two. One full year of writing a short story a week. I’m several hundred words into a story for this week, although with no clear idea where it’s going. That isn’t unusual, and I’ve learned not to let it worry me. I know there will be an ending, I just haven’t found it yet.

While the longer fiction is coming along, it’s not making the same progress as the short stories. I’ve thought about the reasons for that, and have some ideas to address it during May. Some of those ideas come from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. His comments about our technological age, and the ease with which we can become distracted, definitely struck a chord with me. I’m still working through the book, but it’s worth looking at.

I’ll report back at the end of May, because I’ve only got about 25,000 words to go. Maybe by the end of May, I’ll have a finished manuscript!

As I mentioned last week, February was a bit of a mixed month. I did complete and submit my short story a week. so that’s four more in inventory. Mostly I got the stories in with some time to spare.

This past weekend though, I was definitely leveraging the time difference from Central to Pacific to make that midnight (Pacific) deadline. That was partly my own fault as I was well into the story on Thursday until I realized I was telling the story of a secondary character, but through the eyes of my viewpoint character.

Talk about draining the energy out of the story.

So on Friday morning it was back to the drawing board and redrafting just over 2,000 words so they’re from the new viewpoint, and much closer to the action. I think it worked better.

There wasn’t such good progress on the novel. That seems to have stalled a little at the moment, but I did go through what I’ve already written and tidied up the timeline. I also rethought some of the scenes and moved them around so the overall timeline is reduced by a day. Poor Jacob will be run ragged by the end 🙂

No real progress on getting more of my short story backlog up onto Amazon, Kobo, and Apple although I finally got Angels Without Faces up on the iBooks store. And wasn’t that a challenge! Sign this, acknowledge that, and approve something else. Then you have to download the iTunes Producer app, load the manuscript into Producer, and then submit to Apple.

I think there might be a market for a workbook to help folks through that process. I put it on the “Projects to think about” list and will come back to it.

March has started well, so fingers crossed it stays that way!

Well I’ve completed the first two short stories of 2020, although the first one was quite a struggle for some reason, probably because New Year was right in the middle of that week. It also triggered some thoughts on how I can write faster, and maintain quality. I’ll be working on that in the next few weeks because it’s an important part of what I want to achieve with my writing in 2020 – which is:

• Continue to write one short story a week
• Complete the Babylon historical mystery novel I mentioned last week, and three others
• Publish wide. I made a start on this by putting my short story Angels Without Faces up on Amazon and Kobo. I’m still working on iBooks!

I’ll post progress on a regular basis along with my other ramblings.