It’s de-lightful, de-lovely, de-stressing (#SFWApro)

This was a good week.
Despite having a doctor’s appointment (routine stuff) that took up a chunk of Tuesday and a couple of nights lousy sleep, I made my 42 hours quota for the week. I was about 30 minutes short on my fiction time, though I’m not sure where I misplaced it. I will make it up, though.
I devoted those 11.5 hours to work on Brain From Outer Space, and added another 15,000 words to the plot. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s less impressive than it sounds, as about 8,000 to 9,000 was carried over almost unchanged from the previous draft. Still, satisfactory.
I’m pleased with the work, except while my new prologue sets up the characters, I’m not sure it establishes the setting and the goals of science investigators as well as my original version did. I still haven’t found a scene to fix that, but I’m working on it. Everything else seems to go well—hopefully I’ll still think so in a couple of months. And my new structure for grouping scenes together and reducing the number of POV switches really helps things.
•I got two stories back from different markets. One went out again (I haven’t found the right market for the other, yet) and two more stories that came back in January went off.
•I was less productive in my Demand Media articles than I hoped. I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t slightly reduce my output—even though it’s my paying work, devoting an hour or two to magazine queries might benefit me more in the long run. I simply can’t seem to find the time otherwise. I tried doing that this afternoon and it went fairly well.
•I completed another story for the Raleigh Public Record. Not out yet, though.
•And I managed to stop work at 5 p.m. every day and destress 15 to 30 minutes (15 if I’m cooking). That really does help me relax overall, even on the rare occasions I have to go back to work later in the evening.
•On a minor note, I had a bunch of little odds-and-ends tasks that I’d been fallen behind on and managed to complete them all Monday. That feels very good. They’re the kind of thing that can slip through the cracks even as they stay on the iCalendar, so I’m pleased to finally catch up on them.
And that’s it for this week. Huzzah.