The first 5,262 words of my new novel project are written! While I doubt very many of those words will ever see a final draft, I do feel like I am off to a good start.
My biggest accomplishment this week was that I actually, for the first time ever, wrote every day (well, every weekday, as intended). This is a huge step in the right direction for me. Even though I had a couple of days when other obligations left little time for writing, I made sure to sit down and squeeze in a few hundred words.
My biggest challenge so far has been not to get sucked into researching when I should be writing. With the sci-fi aspect of the book, I am finding that every few words I come to a point where I need a new name for some concept. At first, I was jumping on the internet, researching root words and languages every sentence or so. I realized pretty quickly that was not going to work. It disrupted the flow too much. So, now this rough draft is full of place holders – people, places, things, concepts, all identified with random letters and dashes. Seems like I will need to set aside specific research time to start filling in these blanks.
In other WIP news this week, I jotted down a couple of ideas for personal essays but I have not devoted any time to writing them, yet. I received a rejection to have one of my personal essays republished but was shown interest in another. And my children's book manuscript is currently still out for consideration with four publishers.
