Hi Folks,
Okay, I had a bit of a rough night last night, but the lag isn’t too bad. So my goal for today is to write two separate short stories. If I can do that, I should shoot straight past my daily publishable-words writing goal.
This is my way of jumpstarting myself back into writing after finishing the novel. Helps me avoid the post-writeum depression.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t celebrate finishing a novel. For one thing, that would be like a mechanic celebrating putting an engine back together after an overhaul. Plus it means I’m leaving behind some people and situations I enjoyed, so what’s to celebrate?
On the other hand, I do celebrate a great scene coming together or a great ending and resolution falling into place, as it did yesterday. That’s like the same mechanic feeling satisfied that during the overhaul he increased the horsepower by 20 percent. (grin)
The Day
Rolled out just after 3 this morning, mostly awake, so I must have gotten more sleep than I thought.
Little girl cat (my youngest daughter) helped with that. She stayed in bed last night until about 2:30 when she came strolling in and jumped up on the couch beside me. She groomed for a moment, then curled up in the crook of my elbow and went back to sleep. Good girl. She was my alarm. Then she hit Snooze. Plus she was reunited with Dad. Made me smile. And we call them simple creatures.
So just after 3 I made my first mugful, let her go play, and completed my commute to my office (about 20 feet from the couch, 70 if you add-in the diversion for coffee).
Then I started writing this. Now I’m gonna turn to the writing ‘puter and write something over there. Back in a bit. Oh, it’s almost exactly 4:30.
Today’s Writing
Well, by 10 a.m. I had the first short story finished. Three sessions and two breaks. During the breaks I read Dean’s stuff (he has the first two chapters of Heinlein’s Rules up) and spent about 10 minutes on Facebook with a favorite niece. I also signed up for one of his Classic online workshops.
The Classic workshops are the ones that used to take 6 weeks and he would assign and grade homework, etc. Then he’d leave the lessons up for a couple weeks, then close them off again. He calls these Classic because he stopped carrying them live but he still offers them (sans feedback on homework, which never was personal anyway) for half the price.
It’s a good value at $150 vs. $300. When I get through the current course, I’ll let you know what I thought of it. Oh, also, once you pay for the course, you can go back to it whenever you want. So like I said, it’s a good value.
About 10:30 I decided to work on the drudge stuff for two stories (the one I wrote today and the one I adapted a couple days ago). Okay, so for each of those I created a promo document (title, description, keywords), formatted it (once for Smashwords, once for D2D and Amazon), created a cover and published it to Smashwords, D2D, Amazon and my website on the Free Story of the Week. I’m up to February 15 now with stories of the week. 🙂 Oh, then I updated my Short Story page on my website. Finished all that by 1, then took 20 minutes or so to walk out in the yard. Then back here to record what I’ve been doing, then a shower.
Now it’s almost 2 p.m. I was turning to write another story, but I’m still tired from the coughing bouts last night. So instead of playing with another story right now, I’m gonna clean up a few things, publish this, and then do some reading. I’ll start writing again tomorrow.
Oh, I did figure out how to add my nonfiction writing into my totals. So you’ll see a daily and monthly total beginning today, and an annual total beginning next year, same as with the fiction. Nonfiction includes this blog (the parts that are unique each day) and the Pro-Writers blog. I don’t include emails and all that nonsense. And of course it will be approximate, but probably not off by more than a couple hundred words per year or so.
Fiction Words: 2556 (I’ll take it)
Nonfiction Words: 766
Writing of “Dr. Zimmer in the Amazon” (short story)
Day 1…… 2556 words. Total words to date…… 2556 words (done)
Total fiction words for the month……… 26598
Total fiction words for the year………… 630589
Total nonfiction words for the month… 7203
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 49305 (since September 1)