#ROW80 - Sniffling In

Fist check-in for Round 4. Start off strong, they say. I feel more like I'm limping in. It's funny how sometimes meeting your goals feels easy, and other weeks you had to fight tooth and nail. This past week was the latter. I battled illness and extra surprise bits of work to come out, I think, in good shape. Here's a look at the goals:

• Lesson Learned - Auto-save is a writer's best friend.  I had two different computers spontaneously restart on me in the past week... in the middle of two separate writing projects.  I generally do a good job of saving as I go, but sometimes the words fly faster than the mouse to the disk icon.  Fortunately, there is auto-save.  Don't leave home without it.  Even so, the lesson here is to be diligent in saving.  There is nothing more frustrating than trying to re-bottle lightning.
• WIP Pages - 6/6.  Just barely.  I slept a ton this weekend and got no writing done, trying to shake my cruds.  Fortunately, I had a two page day earlier in the week, and then I pushed through on Monday and Tuesday.  I expect to be done with the MS before Halloween.  Then we'll switch to editing goals.
• Blogging - This posts makes 3/3 here, and I hit 3/3 on my other blog.  I had to buckle down early this week here as well, squeezing out what were probably short, quicker posts than I usually write.  Still, the purpose of this goal is to force myself to practice.  And it's great practice to try to communicate an idea small time budget.  Makes you use your words efficiently.  Or just suck.  You decide :-).

But I hit the goals!  This past week was a battle.  Next week will likely be a snooze.  Isn't that how it goes?  You buckle down, work your tail off, and then you come up for air a week later and realize you're ahead.  It's almost magical.  I always have a miniature moment of "WTF did I forget to to do."  Because if you experience the legend known only as Free Time, you know how hard it is to trust and believe in.  A fickle friend, says I.

I have some great ideas for my fiction thread on here.  Which reminds me, I need to go make notes so I remember the ideas.  Discovery writing is fun like that.  Ideas fall like ripe apples... when they're damn good and ready and not a moment before.  Surprise!  Newton: "Oh, so that's gravity... I should include that in my story."  

I'm pretty much out of characters that I can do a closeup on for my first novel without ruining things.  I purposefully kept the cast pretty small too, as it was my debut effort.  I didn't want to get too large in scope and fall flat on my face.  I'm debating about beginning to do closeups for my upcoming novel.  I think I may start when the MS is done.  Should give you a sneak peek as to what is coming, and may generate some excitement.  On the other hand, I'm hesitant to go public with anything before it's been properly edited.  You never know what you might change.  So we'll see.  It depends on how confident I'm feeling.

As always, I'll wrap this with a look at the word counts:

• Project Fiction: 2,283
• Since last check in (two days ago): 5,511
• Grand Total for Round 4: 9,146