So how did the first week of 2022 go?

Better than average, I think.

The morning is still overstuffed with pets but focusing on non-creative writing seemed to get me started and leave me reasonably fresh for creative stuff come afternoon. That I slept very well this week didn’t hurt. Of course, neither did waking up really, really early Thursday morning, giving me a couple of hours with no animals around. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

That said, the cold mornings this week played a large role. TYG didn’t really feel up to walking the dogs in sub-freezing temperature so the walks didn’t last as long as usual. That let me start ahead of the game. We’ll see if it still goes well when we have our normal mile-plus walks. I’ll actually be glad of that — it’s good to get outdoors, better for me to get the added exercise and it’s good for our dogs too.

So in contrast to last week I only came in .25 hours short of my quota, and that’s mostly because my eyes got too tired today from indexing Undead Sexist Cliches. Indexing is one of the most tedious writing tasks there is: go through the PDF of the eventual hard copy, making notes for every name in the index file, plus topics: Christianity, purity culture, rape apologists, rape and chastity, harassment, incels, etc. I’d thought I could get it all done tonight but I’ll have to wait until Monday to wrap it up.

A minor plus is that indexing has caught a couple of names I’d mistyped so I was able to correct them.

The ebook has been formatted via Draft2Digital and set up for release later this month. After I correct the text, I’ll have to go through all the approvals from the ebook vendors again, but it’s a quick process. Indexing is going fast enough I should have the hard copy ready to go too. Indexing is a lot faster than my film books as I don’t have those huge blocks of names in the credits for the films.

I finished another draft of Oh the Places You’ll Go which I’ll probably read to the writing group at our Jan. 18 Zoom meeting. It needs work, but it’s definitely going in the right direction, I think. My work on Impossible Takes a Little Longer was less successful. I finished another chapter but the changes I’ve made mean the next section needs serious reworking. I played around with various reworkings and I’m not quite sure what the best path is. I think next week I’ll just start writing one of the options and see how it works out. I often bog down in thinking about what to do next so let’s see if writing it out works better. Perhaps a few days away will help.

I sent out four stories and got the first (Death Is Like a Box of Chocolates) back already, with a “not right for our needs, try again” response. I also got back No One Can Slay Her, which I submitted last month. That one was much more positive: they liked the story, enjoyed reading it, but they’re not taking it (I presume that means something on the lines of “we want 14 stories and yours came in at 15”). Which is nice to hear, though I get it often enough I get frustrated not getting past that “good but not good enough” barrier.

All things considered, though, a satisfactory week.

#SFWApro. Covers by Carmine Infantino and Kemp Ward (bottom), all rights remain with current holder.