New Words: 1,331 (Beet Down)
Editing Page Count: Starting at pg 34 this week
I started this year off on a very good writing “note”. Things started spiraling downhill before the pandemic was even a thing with projects sort of exploding at work in Jan/Feb, and I was sick with something I couldn’t shake probably due to the stress (Early covid? The common cold? Mono? We’ll never know, I suppose). I was just sort of starting to feel better and be able to think about writing again when…Pandemic! Life changes every single day!
Ugh. No fun. Headspace for writing? I barely had the headspace to pick out clothes in the morning, much less string two sentences together coherently.
Thankfully, things are finally starting to normalize a little (except the weather – I swear, we have two modes available this year: fry or drown), and I’ve spent the last few weeks building a writing habit, and the last two trying to gain foothold on an editing habit. I am cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to keep both going long enough to…you know…finish and maybe even publish a couple of books this year. Things actual “writers” do. And something I’ve not done in far, far too long.
Surprisingly, my new writing time is in the morning before work. Fifteen minutes is all I’ve got (20 if I really push into my shower time), but my minimum is 250 words, and I can often push into the 300’s without too much extra work or time spent. I’m working on one of Alex’s Death by Veggie stories (because it’s fun, and I needed something just “fun” to get that habit set again), and I’m on track to finish it this week. That feels…excellent.
As far as editing goes, I’m editing late at night right before my reading time four days a week (Mon-Thurs). I also have 15 minutes allotted for that, though if I push into 20, no big deal. I’m working on Animal, one of Alex’s books I wrote several years ago and put away because it sort of goes off the rails towards the end and it needs to be fixed. I honestly can’t remember which page I stopped on when I was editing before, but I started over a few weeks back, and I’m now on page 34 of 90 (manuscript pages, not formatted pages). It’s going pretty well, and I have to say, the first part is better than I remembered it being. So even though I know I have to tear a lot of it up and re-point the entire plot later on, I feel good about this early part of the story.
I mean, the immature writing is kind of punching me in the face, and I’m trying to fix that as much as possible, but while I can recognize it, I’m still not one hundred percent certain of how to actually fix it, so…there’s that. But I’m working on it. Which is the whole point.
And now that I have a good handle on “writing time” and a flimsy but somewhat sticky handle on “editing time”, I’m trying to fit “blogging time” back in as well. That’s a story for another blog (my main one, probably), but it’s probably still going to be hit and miss for awhile as I hash out time and methods.
We’ll see how I do, but the important parts are writing and editing. That’s the focus, and I feel good about getting as far as I have in the past few weeks.
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