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Day Two: Writing a Novel in a Half Month
Chapter Two: Day Two … Standard day so far. I will keep doing the hourly breakdowns of the day as I go forward. I’m keeping little notes on a scratch pad so I remember exactly. Last night, after I signed up, I worked on reading Cave Creek stories for about an hour before at 3 am going to watch some television. Ended up getting to bed around 3:30 am. Day Two, Entry One. 11:30 am. Rolled out of bed and got to this computer around 12:30 pm with my breakfast protein bar. That is pretty standard for me these days unless something strange is going on. I spent one hour…
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Day One: Writing a Novel in Half a Month
Chapter One: Day One I will be returning here numbers of times during the day to update this chapter. That way I don’t miss anything along the way. At least I hope I don’t. Also, I will be able to talk about my moods, what I am thinking about something. Much better than trying to recreate the entire day at the end, when I am tired. So onward with this. Day One, Entry One 11:10 am. Rolled out of bed just about at my normal time these days and with my breakfast bar, made it to my internet computer around noon. I worked on email for a while, then spent…
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Writing In Public…
Prologue Decided to do it. Write a novel in public again, detailing it out in blog posts every night. Totally insane, but great fun, which is why I am doing this. The last few days were interesting. The more I looked at the next ten to twelve days, and looked at deadlines, and publishing and other writing projects I will be doing, the more I realized how much I had to do. So the sane thing would be to just push off trying to do a novel quickly and in public. I’ve failed a number of times trying this because of scheduling issues the first year I was here in…
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Smith’s Monthly #46 Out Tomorrow
In Theory… That means that I will have gotten two months out in a row, and already working on Smith’s Monthly #47 layout (March issue) and putting #48 together (April issue). As I do covers for short stories, I’ll post them here. But I have a desire to do a novel quickly, so I may do one of those books that I talk about the writing moment-by-moment each day for 10 days. The reason I got onto this idea was way back (years and years ago) I did that here, put all the blogs together into a book called Writing a Novel in Ten Days. Well, that book is in…
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Downside of Being Disorganized…
Just Because I Like to Write… Yup, me and Heinlein’s 4th Rule have a sort of love/hate relationship. As I have said often, I have no idea how many short stories I have written. Number ranges from 400 and up. Maybe way up. Over 200 have been published in Smith’s Monthly alone. So while putting the next issue of Smith’s Monthly together, I had a story manuscript in paper, but could not find the file anywhere. So a few days later I had my writing computer basically give up the ghost (lost nothing but the mouse said “Nope” and I tried three different alternatives and all of them said, “Nope.”),…
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How I Did In January… My Challenge
I Learned and Did Fine… In my opinion. Here is what I said I wanted to do in 2021 on January 1st. (You remember, before the insurrection.) “So my challenge for 2021 is to write a story per day for the year, plus write a novel per month, plus publish over 70 major books.” Well, so far, so interesting. I managed 6 short stories in January, right up to January 6th, then got distracted for a few days. Then as I went back to it, I realized that my tracking systems for short stories sucked beyond words and I couldn’t even remember much about the six I wrote a few…
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New Challenge Update
Nothing Changed… Just Some Focus… With all the world events, it has been damn near impossible for most of us to focus over the last two months. Still, going into 2021 with the vaccine coming on and the chaos-in-chief leaving, I figured the future was solid enough to make some goals and to push myself for 2021. And I still believe that. Just didn’t know that 2020 was going to have a 13th month. So lost a bunch of days and a bunch of focus, as many of us did over the last 20 days. And the waiting and wondering what was going to happen next just puts an underlying…
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Pattern of Work
When the World Lets Me… Which is has for the last few days. Great fun. I start off doing email when I first get up and get going. Usually around noon or so. Then errands and lunch. Then around 3 or so I go down to our office and work down there for about an hour and a half, putting things together, sorting, putting up shelves, you name it. Basically physical work. Then more email, then a quick nap and then dinner. After dinner I am in here doing other stuff, including assignments and misc work at my computer. Often reading some. (Remember, bad eye so computer time is limited.)…
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Quick Blog
Web Site Acting Whacky… So going to post this quick to keep my streak alive in case something goes wrong. Plus I am late tonight. I got late because I finished a short story after all the assignments from the workshops. Then I spent a couple hours on the Cave Creek novel. So good progress on writing today, and I spent a bunch of hours down in our office working on getting stuff in order down there while we had cleaners up here. And a couple hours out looking for supplies to use for my marble collection display and sorting. Found some. Busy day. Productive. And Kris and I watched…
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Stay Organized…
In Other Words, Do As I Say, Not As I Have Done… Spent more hours tonight than I care to think about getting organized from at least three or more years of not being organized, just writing. Yes, I am reverting to a spread sheet for some stuff, and file folders to gather up story files. But trust me, when you get upward of a hundred short stories that are not tracked or in any kind of order, and you are writing as much as I am, it is time to organize. Don’t wait until then. Too stupid for words. And even more annoying, I found at least five, maybe…