Day 2: Thursday, 24 February
Current draft: Garland of Praise
Today’s starting word count: 46,304 words
Time worked last session: 1 hour 10 minutes (total time so far: 1 hour 10 minutes)
Today’s goals:
- Bronze: 1 hour editing
- Silver: 1 1/2 hours editing
- Gold: 2 hours editing
Goal level achieved last session: Silver (1 hour spent editing)
I had grand hopes for the last two weeks in the writing sphere. As far as I knew, they were mostly “blank” weeks—some garden work perhaps, but nothing too major. Even though it was the busiest part of summer, I thought I’d be able to squeeze a bit of time in, surely.
Well . . . that didn’t happen. We had company for a while (which I loved), and the tomato harvest started with a bang. Honestly, I’ve had to fight some discouragement over the distractions away from the computer. And the few times when I could have stolen half an hour or an hour to work on it, my brain refused to even try to cooperate. But despite the discouragement, I’m back. It wasn’t the time to be working on it then, but it is now.
On day one, I managed to find all the puzzle pieces of this story and get it compiled into one cohesive whole. I didn’t have time to go beyond that and actually start the editing process, but that will happen today, Lord willing. My plan at first—to ease myself into the editing process—is to read through the entire thing, and take as many notes as I possibly can.
This story is still little more than a short story in my mind, although judging by the word count above, it’s a full-length novella! I’ll be interested to watch that word count over the next few weeks, to get a feel for how much I add or take away from the story. If I were honest, I’d hope that it will go down. I know there’s some fluff in here—not nearly as much as in some of my other stories, thankfully, but still some.
After I do the full read-through, I’ll probably take some time to go over all my brainstorming notes, and see if there’s anything I missed—anything that needs to be put back in here. But that time will come.
For now, I’ve been given the precious gift of a few hours this afternoon to get some work done on this long-overdue project, and I’m grateful. Two weeks off or no, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.
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