January Stuff and Onward

The Koala is still missing, but I've joined a challenge through a mailing list I'm on. Participants each picked a wordcount goal for the year, and we divide it by fifty to get a weekly goal (assuming two weeks of vacation per year) and report our progress each week. There's a secondary challenge to see how long we can maintain a writing streak, meaning writing every day for X number of days, "writing every day" meaning producing at least 250 words -- no adding one word and calling it a writing day. :) So far I've written every day since January 2nd (I didn't do any work on the first) and I'm well over quota for making my goal for this year of 250K words, yay. I'm not counting on that lasting, since my productivity is at the mercy of my brain chemistry, but it's great to see a buffer building up.

I added a wordcount meter-thingy to the sidebar of Angie's Desk to track my progress. Apologies to folks who read the other sites, but I don't want another separate thing I have to update regularly across three sites. Hopefully I won't completely embarass myself over the course of the year, having this out in public. [crossed fingers] I'll update the meter-thingy every Sunday night or Monday morning, when I send my wordcount to the guy who's organizing the challenge.

My total for January was 35,454 words, which is my best month since December of 2011. (I think I mentioned a little while ago that 2012 was a massively sucky writing year? :P )

I finished the third Sentinel Novel a few days ago, which is another major milestone. It still doesn't have a permanent title; I'll figure that out before I submit it. This is Manny's story, and since Manny used to drive an ambulance, I've gotten some feedback from a couple of friends in the medical profession on how I'm handling medical type stuff. I need to incorporate those comments, and also go over the whole thing with sandpaper looking for typos and stray commas and inconsistencies and such. I expect to get it subbed soon, though, and that's pretty awesome.

Since wrapping Book3, I've been kind of bouncing around, doing a bit of this project and a bit of that, not really finding anything I can settle on. I have a lot of partials on my hard drive, and I've worked on a few of them. I also started something new, but that was more in the way of getting an idea down in pixels before I lost it, rather than being ready to do serious work on it; I think that one'll probably stew for a while before I focus on it. But I'm feeling like a whole litter of popcorn kittens right now -- I always have a lot of ideas/stories I could work on, but having just finished a big project, I also have an opportunity to work on whatever I want, and it's hard to commit to any one thing because so many things look cool and interesting. :/ I figure I'll let myself bounce around for a few more days, then settle into something. Note that I almost always work a bit here and there on various projects; what I'm looking for is something to be my main project, that one that gets most of my attention.

Until then, I guess I'll keep poking around, working a little here and a little there. Eventually it'll all come together like biorhythms and I'll finish three things in a week, and that'll be cool too, LOL!

Angie