Monday, October 2, 2017

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to No Schedule

Short Fiction - 495
Long Fiction - 2724
Poetry - 0
Total Words - 3219
Editing Hours - 0
Paragraphs of Notes - 3

Not bad, not bad, but I could have done much better. I have to be honest here and admit that most of those words happened on Saturday.

I had great plans to finish my bridge story on Friday during nap time (the grandbaby’s, not mine), but although I took my lap top with me to the daughter’s house and remembered the power cord, I forgot the mouse. And seeing as the first thing I did with that lap top was disable the track pad, it didn’t exactly help me access anything.

But Saturday was a good day to write. It started at the local library where I finished my story then went on to write about 1,000 words (two different scenes) on Wandering Wizards. Got some more words in when I went home but then I had to go to Wal-Mart to get some rolls for dinner and came back with the new Lynsay Sands book.

I tried not to read it, I really did, but I figured I deserved a reward after all that writing I did so I cracked it open Saturday night and finished it late Sunday afternoon. And by cracked I mean opened. I would never crack the spine on a book!

When I first started this blog I said I wasn’t going to stick to a schedule. I think that was about the time I just finished serializing Elemental Earth so I was feeling a little jaded about the whole thing. Take my advice, if you have the desire to serialize a novel, write it first then serialize it. You’ll save yourself a whole lot of time and trouble.

At one point I think I was serializing two novels at the same time, plus doing a flash fiction each Friday, plus a new poetry form each week (can’t remember what day), and a series of non-fiction pieces on another day. It gets wearing after a while. I remember with the flash fiction I’d spend almost as much time trying to come up with an idea as I did working on the actual story. And I started to hate those poetry forms. It was just too much.

At any rate, what I’ve learned over the past few years is that as much as I’d like to believe otherwise, I actually like schedules. Maybe not quite the strict schedules I was following before, but something a little looser.

I stopped posting writing updates on my regular blog because it’s for, well, regular stuff. Although I do post the repeat of my poetry there on Fridays because people seem to like my poetry. I do an update of what’s going on in my life on Mondays, and because health has become such a big issue with me lately, I’m thinking of adding some kind of health/fitness post on Wednesdays. Probably not until the new year though.

Over here I’ve been doing the wordage report on Mondays, to keep me honest about my writing progress (or lack thereof), something poetic on Wednesdays (the first Wednesday of the month is always a poetry form), and fiction on Fridays - sometimes a prompt (always on the first Friday of the month), sometimes a flash story (or two), and sometimes an excerpt.

If that’s not a schedule, I don’t know what is. :-D

So it looks like I have to change my little manifesto on the side bar, doesn’t it?

In the meantime, don’t forget to check back on Wednesday for a new poetry form and on Friday for October’s picture prompt.

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