Writing Progress (June 12, 2020)

The bad news is that I haven't been able to write as frequently as I had been. Thus, days go by with only a few paragraphs here, an edit or two there. The good news is that earlier this week, I had a really productive day and managed nearly 10,000 words (I think it was 9,700 or so), much of it in a section of my story that had been giving me fits in just trying to figure out what I wanted the characters to do and how they'd react to each other. Sadly, overnight, I had a computer crash. None of the text was lost (yay!), but the app that I use to write and track my statistics lost the information on what I'd done. So my single best day of writing is absent from my daily writing stats. I don't know why this bothers me as much as it does, but ... yeah.

And if I'm being honest, now that the weather has finally gotten nice, I'm spending way more time outside reading than I am inside writing.

Writing Progress (May 29, 2020)

Sadly, no real progress to report for this week. I kinda took the week off. Wrote a few words here and there but... Like I said, no real progress.

Writing Progress (May 22, 2020)

For most of the week, I didn't get much done, if by "much" I'm talking just in terms of word count. On Wednesday, I managed to write about 2,000 words but they were part of a section that has been giving me trouble. And today, I managed to write nearly 4,000 words on a section that I was anxious about (in both senses of the world). Anyway, the novella currently stands at about 56,000 words.

Writing Progress (May 15, 2020)

I felt like I was more productive this week than I (apparently) was in reality. Only about 8,000 words in my story (I guess I should start calling it a novella). Scrivener tells me that the project now has right around 48,000 words and would be about 140 pages if it were printed as a paperback.

I solved last week's problem by breaking the troubling chapter into two parts and using that first part to deal with some of the issues that were giving me trouble later on. I think I like the way the story is flowing now, but I guess we'll just have to see when I get a bit further. I have two sections coming up that I know will be difficult to write.

I've decided to give myself a break when I'm not feeling in the mood to write. My output isn't great if I'm trying to force myself. But when I am in the mood and the words are flowing, I'm finding that this sort of writing is ... oh, I don't know. A release? Cathartic? Anyway, when I'm in the mood, I'm really enjoying the effort to tell the tale.

New captions? Um... My queue has plenty right now.

Writing Progress (May 8, 2020)

Looking purely at the numbers, it wasn't a very productive week. Only a handful of new captions and only about 5,000 words in Raspberry's story. But that doesn't tell the whole ... um ... story. You see, I wrote about 5,000 words in the chapter tentatively titled "Going Home" ... and then I erased it because it sucked. So I wrote it again. And erased it again. Better than the first draft, but still just not what I wanted. So I really wrote about 15,000 words this week but don't have anywhere near that output to show for it. Oh, well. It's not like I'm working on a deadline.

Writing Progress (May 1, 2020)

I'm sad to say that this was not a very productive week. I was very, very busy with work leaving me with very little time for other pursuits. And, if I'm being honest with myself, I think I was a bit mentally fatigued after creating 200 captions over the last two weeks. Not writer's block, as such; rather, I just need a bit of a break. I did manage to write about 4,000 words in my story, though I spent more time plotting out future chapters and doing some revisions on earlier parts of the story. So, like I said, not a terribly productive week. Oh, well.

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.

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...

Could We Really Get a Mindy Z Short Story?

Maybe? I've got a whole bunch of short story ideas, several of which I've started writing, a few words here and a few words there, but few have progressed beyond some very initial stages.

Until now...

While I've been working from home, I've found myself with a bit of free time here and there between working on this and working on that. And in that free time (and some of the free time I can find late at night, too), I've started working on something that is going by the working title "Mistaken Punishment" or, alternatively, "Raspberry". The idea was inspired by a story on Fictionmania a week or three ago (I'm not going to tell you which one, just yet, but I will if I eventually publish my story). That story really wasn't the type that I tend to read, but something about it caught my attention and gave me an idea to work with that would let me play around with some of the themes and ideas I that I like to explore.

Anyway, the story is far from done, but so far I'm on Chapter 4 and it's nearly 13,000 words long! I was initially thinking that this was a 10-15,000 word story, but I'm still in the very early stages of the story I plan to tell.

Right now, I'm thinking about working through the next chapter or two and then maybe posting an initial draft for comments. If this thing gets longer and longer I will contemplate trying to put into an ebook format and sell it via Amazon or Smashwords or something. I've never really thought about trying to monetize any of the things I do here, but this might give me the impetus to do so.

We'll see. Stay tuned.