I shall count this as a learning-experience week (#SFWApro)

My performance was definitely unsatisfactory this week. However, as I’ve mentioned often enough, random fluctuations are inevitable. And at least I can see clearly why some of them happened.
For one thing, this is the first time since starting Time Travel on Screen that I’ve had what used to be a normal amount of Demand Media work. Doing the online articles put a lot of pressure on my time for everything else.
And for some reason I scheduled work on two or three nights this week, and that was foolish. I know from experience I don’t work well in the evenings, but watching extra time-travel movies after work gulled me into thinking I could do other stuff too. Barring deadlines and urgency, no. Next week my evening work will all be watching films.
Then, on Tuesday, I slept really late and my brain, as it often does, concluded it must be a holiday. Coupled with various errands and non-writing things that needed getting done, the day was pretty much shot.
So, all that said, what did I get done?
•I’m once again doing Demand Media articles, as noted. Not quite as many as I’d hoped: they’re tech articles rather than finance or science and I kept finding articles I planned to work on were beyond my expertise (if I’m not sure I can get it right, I’m not writing it).
•I got some more work done on The Stage Is a World. It’s definitely getting more of a plot now, so I think it’s on its way to becoming good (though that will undoubtedly take many more drafts). I’d have finished this draft except, as noted above, time wasted.
•I did more work on my Time Travel book.
•I went over a boatload of history, science and children’s markets that might fit some nonfiction markets I have. It’s really slow going matching up ideas and markets, but I’m feeling tentatively optimistic.
•I have a new And column out on Sandy Hook truthers (the people who think the government staged the whole thing to set up an anti-gun crackdown).
•I sent out Many-Splendored Thing again and got Atlas Shagged back from Every Day Fiction, with quite a bit of feedback (some of it positive, even though they turned it down). This is not the first time I’ve been told that the story has no punch if the reader doesn’t know Ayn Rand’s work, which may indicate an unfixable problem. I’d assumed Rand was familiar enough that wouldn’t be an issue, but if it is (and it’s possible that being as political as I am, I overestimated awareness) there’s no way to rewrite an Ayn Rand parody so that it doesn’t parody Ayn Rand. However some of the other criticism is structure/plot, so I’ll take a look at it soon and see if I can apply it.
The highpoint of the week, though, wasn’t writing-related at all. TYG and I celebrated our third anniversary Wednesday with dinner out at Sage restaurant in Chapel Hill. No matter the ups and downs in my writing, having TYG in my life makes everything amazingly better.