Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Update

  1. Why is there more rain coming?  It rained almost all last week.  The dogs haven’t been for a walk in days.  It’s been damp and foggy and rainy and gross and HOT.  It’s made me very not holiday cheery.  Grr.
  2. My grandmother is stable.  She’s not paralyzed, just very very weak on her left side.  She’ll be going back to the nursing home early next week to start rehab.  I’ll head down to see her then.
  3. I need to do a bunch of cleaning out and organizing today.  Yesterday we went to help my MIL work on cleaning out my husband’s grandmother’s apartment (she just moved to a nursing home last Monday).  I inherited a trundle (to go with our day bed–MUCH needed, now we have guest bed space for more than ONE person!), a small freezer (about the size of a college dorm fridge–just enough for buying stuff in bulk or doubling dinner recipes), and a bunch of kitchen stuff.  I might be considered to have a thing for vintage kitchen stuff.  I got several small corningware dishes, three great, homemade aprons (made for short small people, unlike all the commercial ones out there), and a few other random kitchen things.  Plus Granny’s box of recipes.  Because I’m the family curator for such things.  It is now incumbent upon me to learn how to make her devil eggs.  Anyway, have to make room for what I brought home.  And also do a bit of culling from the Christmas stuff.  We got the tree decorated on Friday (FINALLY), and there are some things that I don’t use or need or even like that can just go.  I need to go through more of the stuff I’ve been toting around from place to place and do some more culling from it too because the current guest room is going to be the nursery/kid room whenever we have a kid, and right now it’s full of other things that will need to either go away or find a home.  This calls for ruthless organizing.
  4. After my grand “I’m going to do BLAH!” regarding Operation GIT this past week, I…mostly didn’t.  There was the office Christmas party (the first of 3 for varying sub groups), the team Christmas party where my boss took us out for hibachi, a dinner out with the family where they screwed up our order and brought us free cookies (KISS OF DEATH, people), quite a few things that kept me occupied during lunch such that I didn’t get any extra workouts in…   I am going to lift weights and do yoga later today.  My shoulders are SO tight, and I need to be all stretched out.  And I actually planned my menu for the next week, so I should do better this week on that front.
  5. On Friday, I cut 5k from DOTH.  I had a character that simply hadn’t been pulling his weight, so I finally cut him entirely out.  I wrote about 1200 words toward knitting together the holes, and also started filling in a number of brackets for assorted things that I’d left during the writing of it.  Yesterday was the 1 year mark for this book.  I now lack 2 brackets and the final 4 scenes.  I’m a little meh about taking longer to finish it, but it’s going to save me time in revisions down the line, so the cleaner I can make it when I send it to my CPs, the better, right?  Plus filling in all these holes and doing the read through has enabled me to spot and fix some continuity and logic problems I hadn’t noticed before, which properly sets UP for those final scenes.
  6. I didn’t get any writing done yesterday, but I plotted.  I have a new series I plan to self pub next year (well starting next year anyway), and I decided I ought to have a freebie short to over up to build some interest (as that worked quite well with Blindsight), so I figured out what that’s going to be and plotted it out scene by scene.  I expect it’ll hit somewhere between 8-12k, which is a solid length for a short story IMO, and will be a good introduction to the characters in that first book.  Once I finish DOTH, I’ll dive into that probably for the remainder of the year.  Riven has sat for a month or two now.  It can sit until January.  My brain needs this vacation.  I have 16,544 words to make it to my WIP500 goal of 183k this year.

3 thoughts on “Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Update

  1. I like to work in “Layers” as I call it. Go through the whole thing periodically and adjust. It’s like layers in painting. So yeah, I think you made a good choice to cycle back and deal with that problem. The story will be the better for it.

  2. I’m glad your grandmother isn’t paralyzed. Maybe the rehab will get that weak side back to normal.

    We had a thunderstorm this morning! What weird weather we are having. It’s still raining.

    As hard and long as you’ve worked on DOTH, I know you’re going to be glad when it’s done. I can’t imagine cutting so many words out and getting rid of a character. But sometimes those read throughs let us know what works and what doesn’t in the story.

Leave a Reply to daringnovelist Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.