Weekly Writing Progress Report - M4 Week 2

Hi All--

I'm a tad late posting my progress report. But alas, here it is!

Week 2
Project: M4 Fantasy
First Draft

Word count this week: 8,590
Total word count to date: 18,234

Not my best week as I didn't hit my weekly 10,000 word objective again, but I do have a good excuse! Some of my family came to visit this weekend so I just had to take a non writing day. I haven't posted about the weekend due to a secret I've been keeping, but hopefully I can reveal it soon! And as usual, when I'm with my family, somehow I always forget to take photos for my blog. Whenever I'm with them I am always in the moment--a good thing in a sense, but bad in terms of documentation!

Here was one photo I got from our dinner Saturday night though!

Since I am behind in my writing goals, you bet I've been sitting my hinny down and getting those word counts up. I'm fairly confident that by the end of week 3 I'll be at 30,000 words and I'll just give myself a clean slate after slacking these first two weeks.

Some things that I've learned

• Keep notebook with me always! Normally I'm good at this, but I've caught myself coming into work without my writing notebook. As I was covering for the receptionist, the whole series arc just came to me and I didn't have it with me! I ended up scribbling it on scratch paper then stapling it into my writing book.
• Keep the mentality that a first draft is just a first draft. At times when I'm pounding things out, in my head I'm thinking You go girl. You're so awesome! Look at you go! And then reading over what I wrote. What the f*** is this s***?! You're better than this! Takeaway is, I know my abilities well enough that the clay will be molded into the figurine that I want, but I have to wrestle with the clay first.
• Talking about your story is motivating. This one we all should know, but I felt like I hyped myself up a bit too much with the completion of M2, and now I feel like I could make it better. So lesson learned. Don't toot your own horn too early. But when discussing the story with my sister the past weekend just in passing, she actually found it really interesting since I'm inserting folklore we grew up listening to but with a twist. I really, really, really, hope this one is hooky enough to draw some interest!
• Make a list, but don't check it twice. Usually when I'm writing a scene another image pops into my head. Or sometimes my head is so chaotic that I need to organize my thoughts into what the reader knows up to a certain point, and what I still need to reveal. So to remedy the chaos in my brain, I put these items into lists and keep adding to them throughout the writing process. I try not to read over the list until I'm read to attack it. But for now it's jot them down, put it away, so as to not lose my current thought.
• Sometimes when I write, I really think through all my scenes. What's the purpose of this one, how does it lead to the next and so on. It's been a really good way to plan out my past manuscripts, but M4 has a natural rhythm to it and cinematic appeal in my mind that the scenes are slowly forming without my help. I better not lose that during the middle manuscript blues though, because it's going to be difficult to trudge through without it.

In other news, Blaire has been sick this week :( He's been sneezing up a storm, which is odd because Blaire doesn't sneeze that much. But when he does, it's usually awww that was so cute. But this week it was one after the other. Sneeze attacks all day! Luckily he got over it in about two days so no need for a vet office visit. Turns out he just had a kitty cold (which is a surprise to me since I didn't know they could catch such a thing!).

How has your week in writing been? Comment below!