Hi y'all. How have you been? That's good to hear! I hope you had a good holiday, and the end of the year is shaping up to be the best for you. Me? Oh, I've been around...
My push to finish this second draft by mid-November didn't go as planned. It always seems like the harder I push myself to get something done, the less motivation I have to actually do that thing. So I changed tactics and decided I have all the time in the world. (By that, I mean until the end of the year, but shhh don't tell) The editor that I was planning on working with won't be free until the first week of January anyway, so there's still time before I hit that next deadline.
I've also - and I feel bad about this - started thinking about looking around for a different editor. There's a lady on TikTok that does editing and talks about book related things that I really enjoy, and although she doesn't really fit the genre that I write in, I was looking into her also and noticed her pricing is much more reasonable than the editor I'm considering. It makes me want to shop around a bit and see if I can find someone that may work into my budget a bit better. The downside is that I've had entire conversations and gotten a sample edit which I enjoyed, so it feels dishonest to then find another editor because of cost. At the same time, I'm doing myself no favors by spending money above what I can reasonably afford. It's a situation and I'll have to think on it a bit more.
On the theme of spending money I can't afford, I bought myself a new laptop recently! I've been writing on a Chromebook for two years now, and it's been fine, but recently I've started to get frustrated with the time it takes to save, which it actively does all the time. I would write an entire sentence and it would take nearly 5 seconds to appear on the screen. Backspacing - something authors do at the same frequency as breathing - would take even longer. So I decided it was time for an upgrade. The new laptop arrived Saturday and over the weekend and easily wrote around 3,000 words in an attempt to test it out, and it was glorious. I think that's going to help the motivation factor as well. No more waiting to see what mistakes I made, or dreading having to backspace five words because of the time it will take.
Which leads to the update on the project! After this weekend's writing sprint, I'm at nearly 58k words, and have around 2-3 chapters left before this draft is complete. Again, I already have ideas of things that need tweaked or edited, things to add, areas to work on, but I'm much more confident in this draft in terms of plot holes and major issues. Semi-related, I stumbled upon a TikTok this morning from a woman who's a best selling author whose book is about her life story which is eerily similar to the crime that I've made up from the top of my head in this book. I think I may want to grab her book. Also, that scares me that something that I thought was insane beyond belief has actually happened. Obviously, anything that someone can make up in terms of horrific things people do to each other is possible, but it's hard to think about when you know it's actually happened.
Anyway, that's really all I have. I'm sorry that I've been somewhat off radar recently, but between work and the struggle to get this story done, I've been spending a lot of time with myself. If it makes you feel better, I've also been neglecting real life attempts to hang out as well, so I'm not only ignoring you all. Once this draft is done and off to an editor, I think life will ease up a bit. Until the push for creating a cover and blurb and getting ready to publish happens, in which case the stress will all come flooding back. We'll handle that when it gets here though. For now we'll just keep on keeping on.
Until next time.
-Dave
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