Backpack Babe

Writing Progress (April 24, 2020)

Nowhere near as productive this week: Only 53 new captions. But I did manage to write 8,000+ words in my ever-lengthening story. I'm beginning to wonder if I haven't actually set out to write a novel.

Alien Design Ideas

Writing Progress (April 17, 2020)

I'm not sure if anybody is particularly interested, but I've been having a lot of fun writing both long form fiction and captions while stuck at home. And I've been having a bit of fun letting my readers know about my writing progress. So, at least for the time being, I'm going to try to provide a weekly-ish writing update.

This week comes with bad news and good news. The bad news is that I only managed about 2,000 words on Raspberry's story. It's not that I've burned out or lost focus; I just had other things going on...

Like captions. Lots and lots of captions. I mean a lot of captions? How many new captions did you write I hear you yelling. How many?

Drum roll please...

In the last week, in addition to correcting typos and cleaning up about 20 older, as-yet unpublished captions, this week I wrote ... are you sitting down?

This week I wrote 145 new captions. Yes I did. Seriously.

Which of course presents a bit of a dilemma. I've been posting one new caption each week (usually Friday night or Saturday night). If I keep to that schedule, I've got enough captions in my queue for three years! And while I like the idea of a full queue, especially so that if I hit a dry spell, my blog won't go quiet, I'm also really anxious for my readers to read my new captions (several in particular). So I'm thinking about posting new captions more frequently. Not sure yet about that. Time will tell.

Oh, and as for what the protagonist of my story will be named, I think I'm going to stick with Raspberry Monaco (but her friends may call her Razz; I liked that suggestion). For those who asked, I viewed "Monaco" as being similar to names like "Dakota," "Montana," "Malibu," "Aspen," etc. And to the anonymous reader who suggested the name "Toledo" ... just, no.

In the meantime, keep safe and stay healthy.

Could We Really Get a Mindy Z Short Story (update 1)

I've actually had both time and the mental energy to work on my short story this week. When I posted last week, I'd written 13,000 words. Well my anticipated 15,000 word short story is now just shy of 25,000 words and I'm still in the early parts of the story. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to wait to post/publish until it's finished or if I'll post it in parts. Nor have I decided where to publish/post. Part of me would like to post it somewhere so that I can get some feedback; after all, this is my first real effort that has gone beyond a few thousand words before being abandoned (and I have a bunch of those). One kind reader has already offered to review (and I appreciate that); I'm just trying to decide what I want to do.

As a special bonus for my readers, I'll offer you a chance to give me your opinion on something. I've given my character a name (a name that she chooses in the story) for a particular reason that fits the character and the story. But I'm still not sure that I like the name and I've been contemplating a change. At present, the character's name is "Raspberry Monaco" (Raspberry because raspberries were her favorite flavor and Monaco because it sounds exotic and reminds her of something that she and her father used to like doing together). While I really like "Raspberry," I can't help but feel that the name is bit clunky or too much of a mouthful (and I don't think I like it being shortened to "Rasp" or "Berry"). So I'm toying with the idea of changing her name to "Monaco Berry".

Voting is now open (though I reserve the right to ignore all of your votes; hey it's my story!).

As for captions, I've managed to fix a bunch of typos in captions that were in my output folder but I've been too busy working on my short story to create new captions. That being said, I kinda feel like working on some new captions this weekend...

Mounted for Performance Art