Writing Journal

 So, I tried to do a Lenten Writing Challenge again this year.  The goal was to edit for forty hours over forty days.  Yeah, I failed.  I might not have had I not had some student loan issues rear their head. 

I'm about to grant myself some grace and figure one hour for every journal entry I made during the last forty days, and see if that makes it more manageable.  And, of course, count whatever I work on tonight.

Next year, I might do a Lenten Reading Challenge instead!

As far as what I'm planning to work on tonight: I think I'll put V&V back into one doc and see how many pages it is.  Or, I could do a word count.  There's at least one scene that's a duplicate, though.  Anyway, the purpose of that is to gauge how much I'll need to spend on printing it for a physical copy and paste.  I might do that at my dad's.  He's said that he'd like me to review the book he's currently working on.  He's said he'd pay me for it, and I might just take it out in trade.  He lets me print mine on his printer and use either his living room or basement to lay it all out for a cut and paste job.

I'm leaning towards keeping it a short story.  I don't know that I have the attention span to write a novel, to be frightfully honest.

Update: it's only 8 pages, and that's without some cuts that I know need to be made. 
Nor does it count the plot points that I'm sure need to be added.  Which I should add before I print them out at Dad's.

Writing Journal

 It's been rough to focus again.  I'm blaming anxiety about my van starting due to the cold.  Found a great page from Tires Plus with some tips to try.  If turning all the auxiliary battery uses off and "cycling" the key don't help, I'll teeter between asking the front desk if one of the shuttle vans can park next to me to try and give me a jump and calling Tires Plus for the same.  I'm leaning towards the latter simply because I'm pretty sure I also have a leaky tire.

Now that that's decided, I'm trying to focus on reviewing the climax, which is at Carhenge.  Found a great site that has some aerial views of it, so I can get the placing down.  Forgot that Jack is an add-on for the return trip to Denver.  Which means that Fred doesn't need to somehow witness Jack going into or coming out of Nancy's hotel with her.

It's been more of a struggle than I'd care to admit, but I'll have done a run through of the whole thing, scene by scene.  I've also separated it into sections, which will help channel any urges to work on something like game play or the Carhenge scene.

Still undecided about the denouement.  I'm leaning towards maybe doing an open-ended kind of thing, where we see the first draw of the fall league.  That may be something I ask of my test readers.

Writing Journal

 Spotify search is being slow.  I want to add more songs to my writing playlist.  Most of the other pages are loading rather quickly now that it's up and playing.  So frustrating.

I really only have today left to work on things.  Checkout is noon, so I suppose I could do a spell tomorrow morning, with how early I've been waking.  It's been so awfully cold that I'm little bit nervous about the van starting, and I'm trying to push that out of my concerns right now.  The locks worked just fine yesterday when I went down to get my pizza.  I still have over a full one left.  I ought to cut back on the popcorn to keep room for that.

Ah, the search is working now!

My plan is to review the exposition and climax before the end of the "working" day.  Part of me wonders if I should make it a novel or keep it short story length.  Reading more things in general ought to help me make that decision, truth be told.  If I want to be a good curler, I watch curling; if I want to be a good writer, I read other authors.  Perhaps once I get to where I feel it's a finished draft, I'll reach out for readers through the Nest.  Nondiscriminatory policies to get a variety of readers.  Part of me wants to have Tara read it, but I question her judgement of a good story; I don't feel I'd get anything critical from it, and that's what I want.  

Then I'll make changes PRN and move to Twitter before submitting for publishing.  I feel that it would be easier to do that if it's a short story, truth be told.  But, we shall see.

Reading/Writing Journal

Reading

Let's start with the reading. I've been more ambitious with that since the new year.  2020 was hard for me to focus, so I didn't read a whole lot. It's still been a bit of a challenge to focus this year, but I've been more patient with myself and open to only doing a couple of pages here and there.  My goal is to finish about a book every week.  I anticipate getting through more once I feel comfortable walking while reading.  I get my second shot on Thursday, and will start calling the office to secure Tuesday as Treadmill day.  I'll probably skip this one, though, since I want to take a Temp Tuesday to Dad.

The book I've been reading right now is A River Runs Through It.  So much of the philosophy runs parallel to how I see curling. I might actually do a goodreads review of it, which I haven't been doing with most of the other books I've finished this year.  Which feels hypocritical of me since a lot of other people's reviews help me decide whether or not I add a book to my list.

p. 2
"It is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o-clock."
p. 23
"...but then every fine fisherman has a few fancy stunts that work for him and for almost no one else."
p. 46
"You can't catch fish if you don't go where they are."

Writing

I got myself a room in a hotel for three nights and four days to work on Virtue and Vice, my curling based NaNoWriMo from 2020.  I didn't plan out the plot as well as I ought to have and made it much more difficult on myself.  I've been meaning to tell some version of this story for over a year now.  It started off with wanting to do it at Arena Nationals, but those got cancelled.  For the sake of my romantic health, I probably should have done it over the summer, or at least put forth more of an effort before leagues started up again.  Otherwise, I run the risk of blurring fact and fiction.  And I think Nic remembers me mentioning that to him.  Although, he also forgets a lot, so maybe that's one of the things he's forgotten.  Something he said to me the last time we talked on the phone won't leave me, though.  But since this isn't a personal journal, I'll leave it out.

As mentioned prior, I skipped a lot of planning sessions that I should have done in October.  (Side note: if I like my NaNo project as much as I did this last one, I might make it a regular thing to do this in January.  We'll see.)  My intentions were to get some stickys on the wall, but these walls weren't meant to hold the ones I have, and I neglected to pack the tape, even though the thought occurred to me.

I found this blog, which helped me organize my thoughts a little bit.  Since I wrote my words in November thematically, as the mood struck, it's not chronological.  I kind of wish that my word processing program had page breaks, but using a string of *~*~*~*~* works for me.  This morning, I create separate docs for Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement.  Before church, I went through the word doc from November and copied each section into the doc most appropriate.  Today's challenge will be to make it through each of those.  

So, off I go to do that.

Reading Journal

 I've been bitten by the reading bug, after what feels like a few years off.  It was hard when most of my books were packed away in 2018 and 2019.  This year has also been a little bit difficult, not because of availability of books or because of time.  Rather, it's been difficult to focus.  I've been able to break through some of that and get back into it.  It's helped that I've reflected back on my adult life to try and find when I was the most satisfied, healthiest, etc. so I can duplicate those conditions to the best of my ability.

2012 seems to have been it.  That included a lot of book reading, as confirmed by my browsing through my goodreads life.  Wish me luck.  I'm 8 books behind my 2020 goal.