I want to personally apologize if anyone heard my near continuous, mental screams of anguish this weekend.

It has been very difficult.

I finished the plot outline for Tangled Magic and Walk the Path, which meant it was time to sharpen the focus. That’s kind of hard to do when you don’t even have focus. On Saturday, I obsessed over the dang thing so much that I nearly didn’t get my words done for the day. I did, but I totally had to shove the story out of my head and not let in any distraction. I did write about Cirvel, but he took me on a wild ride and showed me a piece of his world from before the time of Tangled Magic and so I was on a thrilling adventure. If Cirvel had turned to me, as character often do, and asked if I now really, really, really wanted Rivic to win, I probably would have sank to my knees, giggled, and said, “No, Cirvel, you are forever the Lord of Gohaldinest. Only a monster would want that wimpy kid to beat you.” **giggle**

When I got back from that amazing trip, I couldn’t even go back to the outline until Sunday. I am still banging my head against the wall with the structure of the story, but the beats are less sporadic and bloody than they were.

And, I’m really focusing in on the process here. I want to learn from this and figure out how to do better going forward. I’ve already had a couple of good insights. Some things are going to clash with my personality, but I really must get over it and start doing the work side of it. Better now than at the end. Dean Wesley Smith is right, and this is my biggest time waster; I’ve got to stop it. Plus side, I have 5 novels in process that I can start using this modified procedure on right away and see how it goes. The process, and we know I’m always saying to trust the process, keeps telling me that I need to move in this direction. So I’m going to listen and hopefully prove that I’ve learned.

Inktober continues to be educational for me on the illustration side. I’m tired and I’m glad there’s not much left. I’ve enjoyed drawing to the prompts — though they haven’t been easy and I generally hate being told what to do, so I find this completely surprising. It’s made me really question and think about my creative process. Not to mention that it has thrown me into unsettled creative waters where I’ve had to figure out how to swim. It has certainly given me more confidence and pointed out developmental challenges for me. I’ve pulled up some more prompts and I’m thinking about continuing with them. I might use them to learn a new skill rather than just inking. I’m not sure I want to start right away or give myself some time to process what I’ve been thinking and feeling. I also wonder if I want to do it daily, but I’m afraid if I don’t set up some rules, I will let it fall by the wayside. Yet, I also don’t want it to be getting a huge chunk of time which takes me away from other things. I really need to develop an agenda for this before I move forward.

Well, I’m going to move along today. I’m still working on that structuring, plus the outline for Dragons of Wellsdeep. I’d like to have that a little further along before I post on Wednesday.

But before we part, here are the numbers.

Fiction words written last week:  5,474 words.

Blogs/Newsletter articles/non-fiction written:  3,134 words.

Daily word goal reached for 79 days. Weekly word goal reached for 14 weeks.

Writing month to date total:  29,458 words

Writing year to date total: 277,263 words

Drawing/painting last week: No painting this week; only drawing for my daily Inktober illustrations.

Audio: I spent 4 and a half hours recording and editing audio. Although Sunday didn’t go well. The universe told me repeatedly (messing up tracks, meta errors, program crashing) that I wasn’t to be recording, so I listened. However, next week I hope to finish recording the audio on For a Good Time, Call Loki.