Sunday Update - '22 Week 3

 Hello again.  Let's dispense with the folderol and jump right in.

Last night, I finished the round of editing I've been working on since December 4th.  Out of 47 days, I missed 11.  That's about a 77% working percentage.  Not bad.  I wish I could do that all year.  For the record, people who work M-F only work 71% of the days.  On the other hand, I usually only work a couple hours a day.  Can you imagine if I worked all those days at 8 hours a day.  I'd rule the world.  So, you're welcome.  (Although, if I ruled the world, there'd be a lot less bullshit in it.)

All of my books are now uploaded to D2D.  And all of them are now available at the big distributors - Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo.  Also, they're available through library distributors like BorrowBox and OverDrive.  (All of them are still waiting on Hoopla to accept them.)  I sold a book last night through OverDrive, so I've got that going for me.  Now to add some marketing to the mix and see if I can generate some sales.  

As for other writerly news, I began working on the cover for Untitled Fantasy.  I'm building a dragon out of used lizard parts.  It's painstaking work.  I'm blowing the sucker up to 1000% and trying to do a pixel by pixel thing.  :shrug:  It'll keep me out of trouble, that's for sure.  And I'm liking the overall results.  May have to change lizards, but I'm also learning what works and what doesn't as I go.  It's all good, baby.

On the reading front, I start out the week pretty lame.  Four DNFs in a row.  After that, I managed to finish two books before my Saturday Wrap-up, and I finished another one yesterday afternoon.  It's all good, baby.

In baking news, I made coffee cake.  I used my regular yellow-cake recipe, but I dolloped applesauce all through the middle layer.  So yummy.  I also made a vat of spaghetti sauce, which netted me another 3 meals worth of leftover sauce.  Yay.

Activity... well, it wasn't a good week.  I spent one morning cleaning.  Dusting and vacuuming everything but the office, so about 1300 square feet.  I never did get around to the office.  It's hard to clean in here when Hubs is working and when he's not working, I don't seem to be in a cleaning mood.  :shrug:  It was too cold for much else, but that's a lame excuse.  I can use the damn bike.  Sheesh.

Needless to say, my diet isn't going well.  Being gungho about curbing the food intake is one thing, actually adhering to the plan is other.  And, like always, every time I think about watching what I eat, I'm thinking about food and that makes me want food.  But the results on the scale weren't as bad as I feared.  Weight: 183.6 - so only up a pound and a half since 1/1.  Still, that much in three weeks is not good.  Perhaps I'm just fluffy for winter.  Yeah, yeah, fluffy for winter.  That's the ticket.

Because of the cold, we're seeing a lot of deer in the yard, gulping down corn in copious amounts.  Most of them are hale and hearty.  And super fluffy because they fluff their coats when it's cold to retain body heat.  Unfortunately, one of our does broke something, probably the ankle, on her back right leg.  Poor baby.  There's nothing we can do, and research told me deer can often do well with a broken leg.  It heals, they go on with their lives.  Killing them isn't the answer.  The best advice was leave them alone, because trying to help will only make things worse.  Hubs saw the same doe a couple days later and her foot wasn't curled under like when we'd first seen it, so she was walking on the hoof and not her ankle.  Ouchie.

Tax time approacheth.  I'm waiting on the mail to deliver 1099s.  I already got the notice that Amazon's 1099s are available for download, so if you haven't gotten yours yet, poke somebody.  Or go into the tax area and see if they're there for you, too.  Not that the news on the 1099 is good.  About $145 for the year.  :sadtrombone:

Since I'm taking today off of writing, I should be able to accomplish some other stuff today.  We'll see.  And it's supposed to warm up a little, so maybe I can get out in the woods again.  Stupid snow.  Anyway, I'm trying to be optimistic.  Strange for me, I know, but you gotta start somewhere.

How was your week?  Accomplish anything?  Was it a week off for you?  (Totally cool, because we need time off every know and again.)  

Sunday Update - 2022 Week 1

Ya know, I've been doing these weekly updates for a while now.  I don't know why it never occurred to me to put the year in the subject.  Hmm.  Okay, it's there now.  Derp.

Anyhoo...  It was a productive week for writing.  I edited six out of seven days.  Got 57 pages done this week.  That's not bad at all, especially considering I took Thursday off and I only got 4 pages done last night.  Of course, last night I ended up adjusting all the chapters, moving stuff around, adding chapter numbers and bookmarking them, etc.  Sometimes when I write the first draft, I either forgot to do chapters, sticking little hashtags to break up the scenes, or I just put CHAPTER and keep writing.  And now that's done - the book has 36 chapters.  I'm on page 238 of 360 of the editing.  Woohoo.

Okay, so Dying Embers and Wish in One Hand are both at 99c now.  I really need to get some advertising out about that.  Maybe tomorrow.

I had a nice reading week.  I finished two books and right now I'm reading a lovely Zane Grey novel.  I really like this one.  (Not that I haven't enjoyed his others, but this one is more... everything.)  I'll talk about it Saturday.

In baking news, I made pizza earlier in the week.  Then, yesterday, I made cake cookies.  In bar form, because I was feeling lazy.  Then I smooshed them into an 8x10" pan instead of a 9x13", so they'd be thicker and more brownie-like.  I probably could've taken them out a minute or so sooner, but they're pretty good.  Sadly, I ate the last of the ice cream yesterday.  Better get myself hence to the DG.  

Activity-wise... Well, it wasn't my best of weeks.  Only three days.  I got the whole house vacuumed, which is a feat.  Then we did one day of working in the woods.  Then yesterday we attacked the remaining leaf piles.  We dragged them further into the woods.  In order to do that, though, we needed to thin the underbrush.  It looks quite nice... or it will once spring comes.  Weight: 182.6

In the interest of being more social, I've been posting more to FB and MeWe.  I've also joined GETTR because a writer I follow was bragging about how many followers he's gotten on there in so short a time.  Me?  Crickets.  But I'm putting myself out there.  Not sure what to say when I'm there (or anywhere else for that matter), but I'm there.  

We got a little snow this week.  But it's gone.  They were predicting freezing rain, but it missed us.  Other than that, it's just been cold.  Yuck.  Oh, well, it's January, so I guess that's to be expected.

And there it is... another boring week in the life of B.E. Sanderson.  How was your first full week of the new year?

Sunday Update - Week 28

Well, here we are again.  Twenty-eight weeks in and on the downslope of 2021.

I finished the first draft of Untitled Fantasy.Thursday night.  Yeah, still don't have a title.  I'm thinking about Shroudlands for the series (umm, since I'm already thinking about the next book, I guess I have myself another series here), but for this book... no clue.  It topped out at 97552 words.  It will expand and contract when I put it under the heat of editing, so who knows where it'll end up.

In marketing news, A Model Curse will go on sale Tuesday.  Sleeping Ugly will be free for 5 days and the other two (Ugly and the Beast and Cinder Ugly) will be 99c/99p each.  So, three books for $1.98.  

With the writing being done for now, I hopped into some reading.  

On the baking side of things, I made cake cookies and pizza.  It's really getting too hot to bake much.

I started the week out pretty good with the activity thing.  Then I fell down.  (Figuratively, not literally.)  I was back at it yesterday, though, so I had 4 active days this week.  I'm up to over 17 miles on the exercise bike.  Woohoo.  And the weight is slowly coming down again.  Weight: 183.6.

Speaking of being on the bike, I've been putting old tapes on to listen to while I ride.  The last few times, it's been Icehouse - their first self-titled album that I dubbed off an old boyfriend's tape and then dubbed again onto a different tape so side B would be the Icehouse 'Man of Colours' album.  Well, when it got to the end of the tape, I was riding along and didn't feel like getting off the bike to change tapes and I just let it play itself out instead of fast-forwarding to the end like I usually do.  A strange thing happened.  It sounded like there was something on the end of the tape.  I stopped the bike and turned the volume up, wondering what the hell it was.  And I heard a baby.  It wasn't crying or anything.  Just cooing and making standard baby noises.  And then I realized it was Owl.  I stopped the tape and went to go have a cigarette.  Then I went back, rewound the tape to the end of the music and sat down to listen.  At one point, I did say her name, so that verifies I did, in fact, tape my baby.  For the most part, though, there was no sound on the tape other than Owl.  And maybe a TV in the background.  I don't remember doing it.  I'm sure I never listened to it before last night.  But there it was.  I wonder if I did that on any other tapes.  Are there more tiny time capsules?  Who knows.

We've decided to sell our boat.  Since we bought it, we've only used it 3 times.  It was fun, but not FUN-fun.  It's just taking up space in the garage.  Plus, I prefer bank fishing, since I get motion sick and have to where those wristbands.  :shrug:  So, I've been going around putting up flyers at various places.  Hubs' ad goes out in the paper on Thursday.  

Oh, I almost forgot.  I got a wild hair the other day and decided to try drawing my concept of a beast I created for the fantasy.  So I sat here and looked at some photos of things I'd said the beast looked like - panther body, bat ears.  Considering I haven't drawn anything in years, it's not too bad.  It's not cover art worthy by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm pleased.  I have to finish it, but yeah, not awful.  And since Hubs could see what it was I was trying to do - bat kitty beast? - I'm calling it a win.  (BTW, I'm calling it a mistmorph.)  Maybe if I finish it, I'll be brave enough to scan it and share it.  Don't hold your breath, though.

Okay, that's probably enough out of me this morning.  How'd your week 28 go?

Thursday This n That

Last night, just after I sat down to write, a thunderstorm rolled in.  So my word count for yesterday was 133 words.  And that was all fixing part of the scene I wrote the day before.

I decided what critter was going to attack the band of intrepid characters and it ended up being one of my own design because nothing fit what I had in my head.  So, I wrote the scene.  Then yesterday, I realized the beastie needed to be beefed up a little in the description and it needed to be gray rather than black.  And it ended up being a battle scene without any battle.  Beasties defeated by cunning.  I thought my solution was rather brilliant at the time.  We'll see if I still feel that way in edits.

For a guy who didn't want his magic or any kind of leadership role, Aryl's pretty good at both.

On the way to go fishing, a little hawk flew across the road in front of me carrying its prey.  Not sure what kind of lunch it would be having, but it was definitely something small and furry.  Too small to be a squirrel, too big to be a mouse, too dark to be a chipmunk and the tail was wrong for a chipmunk anyway.  :shrug:  Eat hearty little hawk.

With the time change, I've been getting up at 4am.  Which is good because the cat expects to be fed at around 4:30 (she used to get fed around 5:30, but time change).  The worst part of it is that getting up at 4 means that by the time it's time to call the office at 8, the coffee is almost gone and I don't want to make another pot just for a twenty minute call.

Speaking of the time change, where is this extra hour of sleep I was supposed to be getting?  Total rip off. 

Can anyone tell me why people vote YES for new taxes?  I wonder if it's because they don't think that whenever they vote for new taxes, they will also be taxed.  Maybe they think the taxes will only hit the other guy.  I mention this because we voted on Tuesday and while we voted against the new tax thing, it passed - by a slim margin, but still.  Blerg.  I guess I shouldn't bitch overly much because some of you out there are paying outrageous amounts in taxes and Missouri is still pretty low.  But I want to keep it that way and apparently others here don't.  Double blerg.

Speaking of which, our property tax bills arrived this week.  Umm, yay?  Most of it goes to pay for our shitty school system, which we never used and never will.  I wouldn't mind helping pay for the education of our youth if the education I was paying for was actually worth something.  Know what I mean?

The bucks have been stopping here.  (Yes, I went there.)  We've got some really gorgeous boys this year.  If only I could get some pics. 

Speaking of pics, I really need to wash my windows.  It's hard to get a good photo when the glass you're shooting through is dirty and has spider webs strung across it.

Wow, I've been kind of chatty this morning.  Thanks for reading this far.  I'll let you go for now so you can get on with your day. 

What's up in your world?

NaNo Day Four - Paused for Research

Okay, so I'm writing a fantasy and there are beasties, of course.  But my memory of all things beastie is failing me.  Thus far, I've been leaving myself notes - :insert minor monster here: - when I can't think of the name of something and want to keep writing rather than stop and research.  Last night, however, I hit a spot where just leaving myself a note wasn't possible. 

You see, there's a spot where the intrepid band of good guys gets ambushed by something and there's a battle scene and in order to have a battle scene, you kind of have to know what your characters are up against. 

So, last night, I paused writing to do research.  I got one good scene out before I reached the point where I had to start this scene.  Then I stepped away, grabbed my big book of magical creatures, and got busy scanning through the pages to see if I could find the one that would fit this particular scene.  And I made a list for later of things that could potentially be used for all those notes I left myself. 

By the time I was finished, it was almost time for the season premier of Holiday Baking Championship, so I didn't get back to the book.  But that's okay.  I'm totally not kicking myself for being behind.  I wrote close to 800 words and that ain't bad, considering how many days this year I wrote zero words.

I'll have to do some more research before tonight's writing session.  I have a list but I'm still not certain what would fit.  Something smaller than a human but larger than a dog and semi-intelligent but totally vicious - made more vicious by being shut up in the mists for a thousand years - that hasn't been done to death in other fantasy novels.  And it can't fly.  I already have flying beasties elsewhere.  A dragon (naturally) and some wyverns.  Plus, flying critters would change the battle I'm envisioning.  And nothing too out of the ordinary.  If the average fantasy reader ain't never heard of it, I better have a really really good reason for introducing them to it.

Anyway, I'm having fun with the whole process. 

I know, doing research after the first of November is a no-no.  Maybe if I'd known for sure I was going to dive back into this, I would've done some research in October, but I didn't, so there I am.  And I think as long as you don't fall down the rabbit-hole of research, you can still accomplish your goals.

Right now, I'm about 2K words behind.  And that's okay.

So, how are things with you?