Flextime

This was a good week.
My reworked schedule is definitely working out well. Even if I don’t feel much like working in the evenings, I definitely feel less stressed with a longer lunch hour and more evening work. And crunching my eHows into a single morning block works pretty well too.
It didn’t work so well on Thursday when I was extremely tired and not able to focus. So I had the sense to realize slogging on wasn’t going to work so well and adjusted my schedule (this is absurdly hard for me to admit sometimes and inspired the title of this post): Light work for a couple of hours, then a couple of hours off to watch the excellent 1968 Midsummer Nights Dream film (more about that tomorrow).
As for the writing:
•I have two Raleigh Public Record stories to work on. Both are progressing well, though not as fast as I’d like. Regrettably I’ll have to make two trips into Raleigh next week for in-person interviews——I hate taking the time (especially as I’m not paid by the hour), but if interviewees are more comfortable that way, so be it.
•I started a new story, Mage’s Masquerade, based on the opening of a romance novel my best friend Cindy Holbrook wrote about 20 years ago (Cindy’s fine with this). To my surprise, it went amazingly smoothly——it’s one of the most polished first drafts I’ve ever done.
Unfortunately, it’s kind of lacking in any explanations for most of the events: Where Montgomery Sinclair met the new maid before, who the unmasked villain is and how the plot fits together. And since I’m shooting for a short story, I can’t take too much time on backstory. Still, I’m confident it wouldn’t have come together so fast if the answers weren’t in my unconscious already.
•I started a couple of other shorts, with less result so far. These are ideas I’ve had for opening scenes that I could never figure out what do to with, so I’m just going to write them down and follow wherever they lead. No idea where that is yet, though.
•The rewrite of the first few chapters The Impossible Takes a Little Longer looks much better now that I’ve had time to go over it and rework it. Hopefully I’ll be ready to show it to the writing group before the end of the year.
•I read over my replotted Brain From Outer Space and it looks good, or as good as one of my outlines can look. In other words, I anticipate lots of problems when I finally start the rewrite, but everything seems to hang together.
I am, however, unsure whether the pacing works——it feels as everything is a little laid back until the last few chapters, rather than a sense of mounting tension through the book. So I’m going over the overall story arc and the individual character arcs and seeing if everything flows the way I want it to. I imagine I can raise the tension level when I actually write the scenes, but a good structure will help.
•Submitted No Good Deed Goes Unpunished after a final proofreading.
•A Happening in Hell (nope, that title’s just not going to fly——and I’m not sure The Groovy and the Damned works either) still has a long way to go, but it’s improving by leaps and bounds.
•I finally found a way to make one of my older rough drafts, All Things and All Men, not suck (trust me, this has been a hard one). Mostly a matter of going easy on the theme and more on the story (something I’ll discuss next week).
Next week looks pretty busy, between the newspaper work and all my usual tasks; I’m considering dropping my writer’s group just to find extra time. I hope it won’t come to that, but duty before self, as Enemy Ace used to say (comics character). Plus an RPR meeting Sunday.
But I have tomorrow and I intend to be thoroughly unproductive and self-indulgent. So there!