Adventures this week have been… oh, look, SQUIRREL!

Yeah, something like that.

It feels like two or three things have been going on all at once. Someday I swear I will learn to focus.

It’s just been challenging to get my words in this week, though I have been painting. It seems like that’s what I really want to be doing this week. It’s making me really consider making my word count next year into a rolling word count like I’m doing with my painting. There’s a little part of me that keeps saying, “You’ve already accomplished your word goal for the year. Give yourself a break and paint.”

Then there’s the other part of me that says that I have over 125 days into my writing streak. Do you realize how long that is of getting a certain amount of words in every day? Yeah, 125 days. Just because I have overflow one day doesn’t mean that I can just apply that to the next day. That’s not consistency!

It’s like the fight of the good shoulder angel and the bad shoulder angel. I’m tired of the constant blabbering in my head.

“But you’re doing it with your painting. Why not with your writing?”

Argh!!! Painting is different, don’t you understand that? What if I couldn’t count the words until the novel was completed?

“Maybe you’d finish more if you did that instead of bouncing between projects.”

BANG HEAD HERE!

Like I don’t bounce between paintings too.

Yeah, just like that.

To make it worse, one night (I think it was Thursday) I sat down to write and instead decided to open up the cover for The Doorway Prince and look at some pictures. I began playing with overlaying images rather than getting my writing done. After a couple hours, I felt like i had the start of a new cover which I liked. I still got my words done that night, though I was falling asleep while getting them in — it seemed like I did that nearly every night this week. I kept tinkering with the cover and finally on Saturday morning had something I really liked. Thus began the process of updating the cover.

Here’s a side by side: assuming I can get WordPress to do that for me.

 

I think it looks so much better. It doesn’t scream contemporary literature any more, but gives more a fantasy feeling. I hope readers like it better too. I do have a few copies left with the original cover if you want to get a first edition.

That lead me to also updating the formatting. I really thought I’d done all my books to the new format — I haven’t, not even close. Apparently I’ve just been doing the same 7 books over and over again. Okay, not quite, but it was weird to see that I hadn’t done as much as I thought I had. Is that my brain being way too overworked? Maybe I’m working on this in my sleep, then just ignoring the fact that I haven’t converted all of them.

I’ve been trying to get back to editing Tangled Magic, but something keeps stopping me. I started wondering if I was missing something. I think I am. Of course, part of it might have to do with Cirvel’s story that I’m writing. Since this is the prequel to Tangled Magic,  there might be something I need. What I did have was a big breakthrough on the Sacred Knight series. There was something I was tinkering with in the fifth book while I was writing it, but I didn’t know what it was all about. Suddenly, as I was working on Cirvel’s story last week, the revelation came so hard that I literally was typing a note in all caps to myself as if I were screaming at myself. I had forgotten about all that when I was writing last week’s progress blog, but in realizing that I might be blocking myself from editing because I needed more time for the story to reveal an important part to me, I started thinking about this.

I also have a few holes to fill in with Tangled Magic. I like to forget about those. I really want to be done working on these books already. It’s time.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time on audio this week. My nights were so late that I just couldn’t get up in the mornings to work on audio, or certainly not for very long.

I did paint. I mentioned that above. The painting I showed last week that I thought was done, isn’t. I came in later and added more to it. It still needs something else. (Or maybe I’m lagging so that I can get a jump start on my painting numbers in 2019. Getting started ahead would really help with those dang rolling numbers I was talking about earlier — I know it’s weird).

Well, let’s look at the numbers.

Fiction words written last week:  4,368 words.

Blogs/Newsletter articles/non-fiction written:  2,179 words.

Daily word goal reached for 128 days! Weekly word goal reached for 21 weeks.

Writing month to date total:  14,229 words

Writing year to date total: 324,054 words

Drawing/painting last week: I did get some painting done, but I’m not sure any of them are done yet.

Audio: I spent 3 hours editing audio.