ROW80 Week 10.5: Collapse

(other ROW80 participants)

Since finishing my second draft last week, I haven’t made any further progress; travel, the flu, and generally being sick of the story have combined to put me off doing any more.

At this point, I suspect the best thing I can do is to start working on something else. I’m going to need more roleplaying material soon, and several other ideas have been growing in the background, so I won’t be short of things to work on.

However, this does mean my goal of posting a story this round is probably a failure. It’s not been a total loss, by any means — I’ve learned a lot about editing, and I’ll very likely get back to this story at some point — but it’s still frustrating to keep missing these goals.

On the other hand, if I wasn’t failing, I wouldn’t be pushing myself hard enough.

New goal for this coming week: write five days out of seven, and find a new project to focus on.

Good luck and happy writing!

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ROW80 Week 1: Fearful

(other ROW80 participants)

Aiming for writing and sleep together has worked, more or less. I began this week doing no writing and not getting much sleep, but caught up with both goals by the end.

Final word count: 3,800 over 4 days.

I also met my programming goal: I’ve now got a short to-do list for this project, which I can use to measure future progress. My new goal for this is to tick off two features by the end of April.

As to posting a story: I looked through my archives for a draft to edit. This resulted in plenty of inspiration for unfinished projects, but I couldn’t convince myself to start editing anything.

Why not?

Partly, I’m reluctant to edit when I have a word-count goal to keep. That should be an easy fix: I’ll try counting words edited the same as words written, and see if that helps.

Partly, though, I’m just somewhat afraid of editing — possibly as a side effect of some other things that have been stressing me lately. I’m not sure what to do about this, other than just diving into editing it anyway.

Good luck and happy writing!

ROW80 Summary — Round 2, 2015

(other ROW80 participants)

I didn’t quite finish my editing by the end of the round; but it’s done now, and I’ve asked a couple of people to beta-read the story.

My check-ins weren’t as detailed as usual, so I’m not sure how much writing I did. There was plenty of editing, certainly; and I read five books, and drafted five short stories.

A lot of the time, I felt like I was going round in circles; but this new story is nearer to being usable than the last one, so I must have learned something. :-)

Next round should be interesting. A few things are changing at work, and I’m still looking at buying a house.

Good luck and happy writing!

ROW80 Week 4: Stepping Back

(other ROW80 participants)

I’ve decided to set my short story aside and work on something else, for several reasons:

Firstly, every change I make seems to reveal two more things that don’t work. This is probably a normal part of editing, but it’s starting to wear me out.

Secondly, I realised I built this story around a deus ex machina. I can think of ways to make it work, but they all involve throwing away changes I’m fairly attached to right now.

New goals

Editing even a 4000-word short story took a long time; for now, I’d like to work on some shorter things that I can finish more quickly.

To that end, my new writing goal is to write or draft one short (under 1000 words) in the next seven days. I’m also keeping the target of five or more writing days a week (as well as my reading goal).

Speaking of reading goals: I read Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral this week. As usual with Christie, I was very impressed by the way she handles all the relationships between characters.

Good luck and happy writing!

ROW80 Week 3: Work Expands

(Other ROW80 participants)

I thought I’d finished re-writing my short story last week.
While I was happy with the ending, earlier details had to change for it to work. Those, and fixing logical inconsistencies, made for most of my editing this week.

What’s left is mainly wording and typos, but I doubt I can sort it out in four days.

That means I won’t meet my goal of posting the story by Thursday, and I’m not quite sure what I should aim for instead. For the moment, I’ll keep editing.

I have asked a friend to beta read the story, so hopefully I’ll be able to get their opinion this week.

In any case, I’ll say how things turned out in my next check-in.

Good luck and happy writing!

ROW80 Round Summary — Round 1 2015

(other ROW80 participants)

I worked on a lot this round, but didn’t quite finish anything:

Progress

My main aim was to edit and post a short story. It isn’t ready yet, but it’s a lot further along now; and the attempt has been educational.

ROW80 Week 11: Learning

(other Round of Words in 80 Days participants)

Last week started well, but I didn’t keep up the pace.

I wrote every day from Monday to Friday — including three days editing my short story — then got nothing further done over the weekend.

That said, I enjoyed what I did get done. Coming back to the story daily helped a lot with staying focused on finishing the draft, rather than randomly redoing things.

I doubt I’ll post the story before Thursday, when this round ends.

Even if I haven’t met that goal, though, the attempt seems to have helped my editing skills. I’m feeling a lot more confident about being able to post a short story than I did at the start of the round.

Good luck and happy writing.

ROW80 Week 8: Measurable

(other participants)

This week I realised what my villain’s motive was, and started re-writing accordingly. As well as making more sense, the new draft lets me do away with most of the exposition-heavy intro I had before.

It definitely feels like the editing I’ve been doing is getting somewhere. :-)

However, I’ve still got to update the rest of the story to fit the changes. Provided I keep up my two days of editing a week, I should just about finish that this round.

As to my other goals: I wrote every day this week, but I’m behind on a blog post, which I let slide to focus on the short story.

Good luck and happy writing!

ROW80 Week 7: Dilemma

(other participants)

Editing was my most successful goal this week. The first draft of my short story had a very long and rambling lead-in, which I’ve managed to shorten quite a bit.

Reading it aloud definitely helped. I’ve had a few people suggest I should do this, but I usually avoid it for fear of annoying other people in the house.

For now, I’m compromising by reading quietly.

I also spent some time reading, but wrote on only five days out of seven.

Good luck and happy writing!

ROW80 Round Summary (R4 2014)

(other participants)

This round, my goals were to write frequently, edit Conkers, and memorise poetry: