It’s been a rough week. Jez and I had a bit of a COVID scare, luckily we’re negative, and the high-temperatures are starting to reduce! We still can’t leave the house until our temps are consistently normal for forty-eight hours.

But, I did manage to get some work done.

Review 8th – 14th July 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

• Write 5000 words for Running The Asset. (Hit 11,920 total words)

Did I Achieve My Goal?

No, but I did add another 3737 words taking the manuscript to a total of 10,658 words.

This Week’s Goal

• Add 5000 words for Running The Asset (hit 15,658 words total)

Schedule

Anyway, that’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by, and take care.

Susan

If you’ve seen my word count updates over the last week, you’ll know that I’ve been making progress towards my writing goals. Here’s a wee keek at how it went.

Review 1st – 7th July 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

• Write 5000 words for Running The Asset. (Hit 6,498 total words)

Did I Achieve My Goal?

Yip! I hit 5422 new words that stuck, taking the manuscript total to 6,920 words.

How Did It Go?

It was tough getting started again after a couple of days off, but I discovered a trick.

Yay! My journal posting schedule is back on track after last week’s WordPress editor issues. As you can probably guess, with the tech issues, things didn’t go quite as planned.

Review 24th – 30th June 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

• Complete Editorial Pass #7 (of 7): Odds and Ends (Sparking Story Drafts) for Running The Asset*.
  • Action Steps (AS) 41b

*You may or may not have noticed that Working The Asset is now Running The Asset. The more I thought of the premise, a spy handling a civilian asset, the more I realised that “running” was a far better word. Also, I did a Google search on the original title and it spat out loads of accounting websites–so not the vibe I’m going for. 😁

Did I Achieve My Goal?

Nope.

How Not?

Much of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were lost to dealing with getting the backend of the site back to normal. For some reason, even though I tried to work on action step 41 B, the website seemed to be far more pressing.

Better late than never. Having wrestled with the site after changing plans and dealing with backend editor issues, I can post my journal for last week. Here’s the original entry:

It’s been another good week workwise—a wee bit exhausting on the physical front (see Jez’s post on our latest bike ride)—and I couldn’t be happier with the progress.

Review 17th to 23rd June 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

• Complete Action Steps (AS) 40 (all from Sparking Story Drafts by H. R. D’Costa)
• AS 41a
• Start on 41b

How Did It Go?

As you can probably guess, I achieved my goals. Woohoo! 🥳

Last week I predicted that AS 40 would be a complex and time-consuming beast. AS 40 is a seven-item tracking agenda, and I was dealing with the final item: time, seasons, timing, etc.

The Beast

The reason it was such a beast comes down to me. The information I was tracking was fascinating and lead me down a bottomless and twisty rabbit hole. You see, 99% of my story is set in Marseille, France, and the other 1% takes place in Glasgow, Scotland.

Last week was a belter of a week! Yip, the days did wheech by, but so did the work. Here’s a look at how it went.

Review 10th to 16th June 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

• Complete Editorial Pass for Character (6/7) from Sparking Story Drafts by H. R. D’Costa
  • Action Step (AS) 38b
  • AS 38c
  • AS 38d
• Start Final Editorial Pass for Odds and Ends (7/7)
  • AS 39a (the aim was to get the first half of the task done)

Did I Achieve My Goals?

Yes! Not only did I achieve the goals I’d set out, but I completed AS 39a and AS 39b 🥳. I even made a start on AS 40, but it’s going to need another day or two to get it all done. (There are charts, calendars, local information, and weather data for Marseilles to put onto the index card outline and my editing/research notes.)

As of this post, I’m currently at this point in the final pass:

Ever since last week’s startling revelation of the obvious—that Thursday is my Monday—my time has been a lot less hectic. Actually, all the hecticness has reduced massively. I realise now that the hectic feeling is just that, a feeling.

It comes down to how I’d framed things—mindset if you will. I set out with Monday to Sunday as my set week, even though that hasn’t reflected my reality for some time now, and that caused me to chase my tail constantly. Now that I’ve reframed my week, it’s like I have a wee bit more time to work, to go out to play on the bikes, to unwind.

With that, here’s the week in review.

Review 3rd to 9th June 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

Last week was hectic. So hectic that by the time I got around to posting my journal, it was already too late—like Friday late—and I decided to skip posting it.

It’s not that I had a lot of unexpected things pop up. Nope. I knew about them. I just hadn’t set time aside for them in my planning. Well, that’s what I thought until the same issue occurred this week.

It wasn’t until this morning that I realised why I’ve been so short of time the last couple of weeks, and the weeks before my holiday time. The time-culprit is so obvious that I can’t believe I missed it. My schedule changed. Monday hasn’t been the first day of my week for a while now. Yet, I’ve been planning everything around it being that way.

The first day of my week is actually a Thursday which explains the major “noh” feeling I get on a Monday—my Friday. Therefore, I’ve decided to post my journal on Thursday from now on.

With that cleared up, here’s how last week went.

Review 27th May – 2nd June 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

I’m a couple of days late on putting up this post. I only have myself to blame. The lure of my first long bike ride in over a decade was too much for me to fend off.

Now that I’ve had a wee bit of time to recuperate (tender bahookie), here’s this week’s entry.

Review 3rd – 9th May 2021

My Writing Goals for Last Week

• Complete changes to Act 2a and 2b (part 1) index cards for Working The Asset.

Did I Achieve My Goal?

Yes and no.

No, I didn’t make all the changes as planned. Yes, I did enough that I’m now ready to move on.

Details

While making all the changes, I started to get this nagging feeling like I was wasting time trying to get all the cards just right. Every part of me was itching to get back to the real pre-editing I was doing last year—wow, I can’t believe how easy it was for other things to take over.

I can’t believe we’re into May already! Last week just wheeched by, and I’m still trying to get my head back round the right way.

As you’ll see below, I’m still working on making plot, motivation, stakes, and character changes to my stack of index cards for Working The Asset. In my fantasy version of pre-editing, it was going to be so quick and easy to make all these changes. But it’s not. It’s slow and laborious. Though, not as bad as doing it after writing 80K words.

The pre-edits are helping me craft a pretty incredible story (well, the kind of story I love to read, anyway), and I’ve had to remind myself often that I’m learning a new method and that it will get faster with each book.

If it wasn’t clear from the above paragraphs, last week did not go as planned. But, the story is growing into something that genuinely excites me. Something I know will be worth the hard slog. Something I can’t wait to share with other romantic suspense/action-adventure romance fans.