As I’ve written before, things such as workweeks have a tendency to average out — just by random fluctuation a string of good writing weeks will be balanced out by a bad one. Which was this week.
I knew today would be a non-starter because I’m spending it doing stuff with TYG, but I’d planned to make the most of the other four days. Monday I got maybe 2,000 words done on Let No Man Put Asunder; however I think much of it will need reworking before I go on.
Tuesday I put in some work on a short story and its showing progress.
Wednesday the cats came in and snuggled with me for around an hour (as in this older photo).
That’s very cool, and Snowdrop even stayed in when I closed the door. However it left me no time for exercise or stretch before the dogs woke up which left me feeling off. After breakfast, I wound up squished between Wisp in the lap and Trixie next to her, both demanding petting and erasing my personal space — and my mind just balked. I got some blogging done, and a little research reading but no writing (blogging, when I’m point, does not count against writing time).
Thursday my focus didn’t come back up. It’s partly my old devil of knowing I’m not going to work a full week so why bother to put in any work at all? I did get some stuff done, but low priority, low-intensity stuff, research for my planned Jekyll and Hyde and Doc Savage reference books. Writing would have been better.
Like I said, the law of averages says not every week is going to be stellar. This one wasn’t. But I did get $16 bucks for some of my books from Draft2Digital sales (thank you, whoever you are!). And over at Atomic Junk Shop I published some thoughts on what makes the Bronze Age of comics distinctive and a couple of Silver Age stories that just stuck with me.
#SFWApro.
Did I miss a golden opportunity? It would have certainly been more fun than most of my paying gigs and might have boosted my name recognition factor. On the other hand, I don’t know what length of book they wanted: the pay would have been good for 60,000 words, unsatisfying for 100,000. Plus it would come in three scheduled payments per book (one when the first quarter is done, one when the manuscript is done, one when revisions are finished or something like that). I don’t suspect them of chicanery but a new company might run out of funding before I got the cash. Who knows?
I read the second half of Obolus to the writing group — well, I got about halfway through in the time allotted. That’s frustrating as I need feedback on the ending, so I’ll wait and read that part again at the next meeting. Otherwise the reading went great. They found it much improved over the draft I read them a couple of months back. One guy said my lines were so good that like Douglas Adams I distracted him from the flow of the story. I can live with that.
That’s pretty much it, but it’s a satisfactory work week. Two months into 2023 and it seems I still have game.
That makes me that much happier that some of my unpublished stories will come out in my self-published anthology, The History Arcane (no release date yet). As I’ve mentioned before, submitting to magazines takes time to review the guidelines, make any odd changes required to the manuscript and of course to read the magazine and see if the story’s a good fit. Self-publishing is unlikely to turn a profit but they’ll be out in the world at last, and that will be great.
Let No Man Put Asunder and got part of Six done. It was a wise choice as a couple of things I planned to do in Chapter Six I’d already done earlier in the book. Now, though, I think they’ve had enough of “run, get attacked, fight back” so I need to change things up. I’m not quite sure how yet.
#SFWApro. Covers by Tom Mandrake (top) and Gene Colan, all rights to images remain with current holders.
#SFWApro. cover by Samantha Collins, rights are mine.
Seriously. I put in a good week’s work and by the end of every day I feel wiped. Not quite as bad as Sgt. Rock, but still exhausted. But it is, as they say, a good tired. I even got in slightly more hours than I’d planned to, which will make up for whenever my schedule goes south later this month.
The romance anthology Starlit Bridges is now out, with my Wodehouse Murder Case included. You can buy it in 
Still, I’m pleased with my work. I got another 4,000 words done on Let No Man Put Asunder, which is harder than I thought. After 
#SFWApro. Cover by Gil Kane, all rights to images remain with current holders.
The big distractions came Tuesday. Snowdrop had peed on the couch the night TYG kept him indoors and she could still smell it. We had someone come in to clean the couch off, after which we and the dogs had to stay off it for several hours while it dried.
would have expired. That turned into a much larger expedition as I also wound up getting Trixie’s prescription food from the vet, plus food shopping done, plus picking up a prescription. TYG is away this weekend at an alumni event out of town — she left mid-morning — so I’ll be sticking home with the dogs and not going out. That saves me having to crate Plushie — he gets up to mischief otherwise – or the slight possibility something happens to me while driving and then there’s no-one here for the dogs until Monday.
collection I hope to self-publish later this year. I also gathered all my 
Fraser Sherman's Blog 