Four hours of yard work on Saturday has left me sore and achy. I didn’t even get up Sunday morning to record audio as I usually do. I was hard to get my words in Saturday night, but I did. I should have listened to the little voice that said I should have gotten my words done in the morning before tackling the pine needles in the back yard. Whoever thought to put a Ponderosa pine in a residential neighborhood was an idiot. The tree was planted years before I moved in. Now it’s a behemoth.

Other than that, I’ve been trying to get back into routine this week from Adrian’s play last week. My maniac drive to get audio done seems to have subsided for the moment, giving way to my need for sleep.

The only thing I can really claim that I’ve accomplished this last week, other than my daily word count and my daily Inktober posts on Instagram, is that I’m nearly done with the full plot outline for Tangled Magic and Walk the Path. I’m so glad that I’m building this because I’ve found some spots where I can move things around if necessary as well as a few holes from the mess of writing I was doing posting it as Onesong here on my blog. These two books are so going through two readers — one for continuity and the other for proofreading — before they see the light of day. I hope the two readers I have for this are ready.

Cirvel’s book is now longer than I thought it would be. I really didn’t think it would be more than a short story. Guess I had more to say. I’m currently writing it in a linear fashion, but I don’t think it’ll stay that way, especially since it didn’t start that way. I’m really excited to see how this book grows.

This is me working on it after I’d had some wild inspiration hit me the night before as I was getting ready for bed. I had to take notes because I didn’t want to pull out my Surface to start writing again. I was half afraid that if I started with all the things running though my head, I wouldn’t stop. And again, this was a week for sleep. So, notes it was, transcribing those notes later.

Stonebreaker, the sequel to Stonecharmer, is coming along nicely too, though I’m starting to feel it shift a little bit. I’m wondering what that’s all about, yet I’m trusting the process to discover what it’s all about. I just might be one a wrong path at the moment, I’m not sure. Or, I’m about to hit on something bit so it just feels like a wall of resistance.

I’ve also been trying to work on Dragons of Wellsdeep. I really hope I have time to go through all of chapter 11 before it’s posted on Wednesday. I don’t know why I have the resistance in this story, except for the fact that in writing Cirvel’s story this week, I made a discovery about novihomidrak injuries that needs to be included in Dragons.

Statement of truth here: that “discovery” came about because of my own pain after doing four hours of yard work. I started to incorporate my aching into Cirvel (little voice told me to write about my agony since I was having such a difficult time getting through the words because it hurt to have my arms bent to type; that’s the fodder of an artist’s life influencing their work) and in doing so realized why novihomidraks have to have a sapere heal them. Now that I know the rule, I can break it, which I knew I was going to have to do in Cirvel’s book. And it’s going to make Dragons of Wellsdeep so much more interesting. As I was writing that last sentence, I had a flash of inspiration which might very well be the key I was looking forward to in order to move forward.

Trust the process.

So let’s see what actually got done last week.

Fiction words written last week:  4,688 words.

Blogs/Newsletter articles/non-fiction written:  1,970 words.

Daily word goal reached for 72 days. Weekly word goal reached for 13 weeks.

Writing month to date total:  20,850 words

Writing year to date total: 268,655 words

Drawing/painting last week: I did paint this week! Not much, but some. I drew my daily Inktober drawings.

Audio: I spent 2 and a half hours recording and editing audio.