Weekly Writing Intentions: March 18, 2023

Daily Diary, Day 928:

On one hand, last week was excellent, in that I got my first major edit finished on time, and I ended up cutting so much more than I ever hoped to. As for my exercise, it was a really difficult week, between rain and a couple sleepless nights, and unexpected doctor’s appointment, I only got in 2 walks, and total exercise average was 50 minutes a day.

Another storm is coming in, with some rain predicted Monday through Wednesday, so I am going to lower my expectations and try to just maintain that average, but I hope to achieve at least a couple of short walks.

On the work front, I am going to do one more read through the manuscript. Now that I’m not looking for places to cut, it is easier for me to see tiny errors. As I finish each day, I will hand that day’s work over to my husband to read. My intention is to finish this process by Tuesday, and then send it on to my beta readers. Today, I have gotten through 12 chapters, about a 1/3 of the manuscript, so I think this a reasonable objective.

After that, well, depends on how I feel. I may just need to take some time off and read some fiction.

On the other hand, I do want to start figuring out how to use my substack posts more creatively. I’ve some ideas, but I need the time and energy to think them through. For example, perhaps I need make the regular daily posts very short, but on substack have 1-2 set days where I produce longer posts on things like historical tidbits, or recommended reading, etc. There is a polling function, and I might start asking you all for feedback as I figure this all out. Because word count does seem to motivate me, I thought I might start keeping a second total per day of words written for posts.

But most of all, I need to regroup, refill the well, etc to get ready to write the next and final book in this series.

Lovely sunny day today, some major cleaning but no phone calls, and I got in a 30 minute walk. I know I’ve shown this flower before, but I saw one brave bloom all by itself today, and I couldn’t resist.