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#ROW80 Check In
I haven’t done a proper accounting of what I’ve been doing as far as my ROW 80 goals. Though I’ve been working on them, everything has been overtaken with my Savvy participation. It’s worked because the goals have matched up, but I haven’t been focused on this. There’s two weeks to go, so here’s hoping I can do a good showing of myself over the next two weeks.
ROW 80 Goals…
1. Finish Casual Love
The story is done. This week I’m going to do a read through and begin writing the new beginning. I’m disappointed that I need a new beginning, but it will be stronger if I start the real tension earlier in the story.
2. Finish at least two short stories.
I’ve finished two: Rescue Me and Decoy. I’m working on a third with a ridiculous name because I couldn’t come up with something that worked. Names are difficult for me. *sigh* I’m hoping to finish it by the end of ROW. I’m well into the story, but thanks to June and the boot camp I’m a little burned out on solid write, write, write!
3. Do writerly things every day.
With a few exceptions, I’ve written almost every day of the last three months. That’s a major success I think. Building that daily habit is important. My day doesn’t feel complete unless I have written something.
4. Juggle revisions and writing.
This has been fairly successful. I do better by large when I can focus on revisions or writing, but I can do both. Right now I’m doing deep edits on Decoy while polishing Rescue Me and making progress on the zero draft of Booty-Call Bust. It’s difficult, but I think I’m learning!
June Goals
This month has been a gauntlet. I knew going in that this would be difficult, but I didn’t think about how long the cycling event would take me out of the game. Neither did I plan on getting sick, which has really put a damper on my writing for a week. But, you do what you can and get to it! I’ve also learned some important things about my writing life this month, which I’ll talk about below, but first let’s review what I wanted to do, and what I did.
May Goals!
- Write bunches.
- Ideally, I will finish the rough draft of 3 novellas/short stories.
- Polish one short story (Rescue Me) and get ready to submit it. Write the synopsis, query, etc.
What I did…
- I wrote the most this month out of any month this year. At this moment I’ve crossed 90K, and there are still a few days to go in the month as of when I’m writing this.
- I wrote 2 short stories, Decoy and one I’m mockingly calling Booty-Call Bust
- Rescue Me was polished and handed over to be critiqued. With my month being so busy I pushed the date back for my crit group to the end of the month so most of this goal is being pushed out to June.
I’ve discovered a few things this last few month. I try too hard to be involved, to do challenges, and be part of things. At one point I sat back and realized that all these other published authors weren’t doing the same things. When I looked at what I was working on for the boot camp and thought back on the time tables I wrote up for myself I realized that because of my challenge commitments I can’t work on the things I want to work on. I would have liked to revise and finish Blood Bound. Where am I with it? It’s ont he back burner, and I am more focused on other things that it’s slipped between the tracks. I want to write the new beginning for Casual Love, but I’m too busy focusing on the challenge writing to do that.
So, from here on out I’m going to restrict myself on challenges and classes. They’re dictating too much of what I’m writing. I feel that I could be further along on a few projects than I am if I weren’t being pulled in different directions for my challenges. Granted, I’ve agreed to do June Revision Hell and a Write-Along Class that I will be fulfilling, but for the rest of the summer until NaNoWriMo – no more challenges for me.
This is not to say that challenges are a bad thing. Challenges are great for connecting people and motivating people by example, that’s just not what I need at this point in my writing life.
June Goals!
- Revise Decoy
- Submit Rescue Me
- Write my superhero story
- Work on my alias
I referenced the issue of writing under a pen name before and after this I’m not going to reference it. I will attempt publishing under a pen name, and I’m beginning to use it, to be present online that way and work on building that ‘brand’. I look forward to the goals for June. While I would like nothing more than to dive into Casual Love and hammer out the book, I’m going to wait for July and fulfill these goals and do some reading time for myself and see the Book Addicts event through to the end. After that, though, I’m following my gut for what I want to work on and focus my efforts.
Do you have goals for June?
Weekly Check In
This is the glad-I’m-alive edition. Yes, I’m being melodramatic when I say that and that I felt like dying would have been a better activity than a post-drinking-bout-of-food-poisoning. This last week was all about recovering from Stampede and getting ready for my bestfriend’s visit from Oklahoma. Oh, and I had Massive Work Things going on. I’m shocked I wrote what I did each day, but as always I think I could have done better, more, etc.
Savvy boot camp has fallen at an unfortunate time for me. I know I’ve written a lot, and people are amazed with it, but I could have written more. I could write more, really. But with the cycling thing and this weekend gone to catching up with friends and a girl’s weekend I feel like I’ve lost two out of the four weeks of the month. Bummer. 
With that said, our team is in the top handful of teams. Last I saw we were in the lead but I don’t know how we stand after a difficult few days between several team members being sick, out on vacation, and other realities of life happening.
A Round of Words is still in the back of my brain. I should do better about the check-in’s and commenting on others blogs. I haven’t been doing very well with that. Hopefully when I rebound from all this icky feeling I will get a handle on that.
With that said, I’m still on track to accomplish those goals. I won’t write as much as I thought I would when I began this whole adventure, but I’m doing great considering how many things I’m juggling right now. So, lets move on, shall we?
Blogging.
I did three blogs last week based on things I heard from Reality TV shows. They’re funny, but it’s also good examples and introductions to talking about things. Writers aren’t the only people who need to learn to edit themselves, and other people need thick skins to deal with criticism. Maybe I can work in a lesson based on The Real Housewives of New Jersey…
Suzan and I are discussing an upcoming blogging series we’ll do in tandem, but until plans are in place I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag.
I’d just like to take this moment to say that I don’t understand the WordPress stats on my site. Normally I’ll get from 50-150 hits a day from unique viewers. Awesome for someone without major publication under their belt just talking about writing and stuff. The last few days my hits haven’t been under 600. That’s awesome. Lots of exposure, but I have no idea where those people are coming from.
Revising.
I did a pass on Decoy and I’m excited about diving into it for Revision Hell in June. I’m starting to think a lot about doing revisions on Casual Love. I’ll be rewriting the beginning of the novel and changing a lot of stuff so I’m cringing, but I think that the story is worth the effort. There’s a lot going on in that story but I like it and I want to see it through to a finished product.
Plotting.
This was an awesome weekend for plotting, sickness aside. It was my turn to bring my plot points to the writing group. I wasn’t sure what format to use, and there was some confusion about how I presented everything, but I got some useful feedback especially on how to wrap the story up and make it cohesive as far as the tension and conflict goes. I think I’ll do some work on that and bring it back next week even though I don’t like bringing stuff to the group twice, this is the plot and I think it’s important.
Writing.
Project: Booty-Call Bust
Genre: romance
Type: novella
Progress: I’m still in love with this story. There’s action and romance and secret spies and I’m having a blast writing it. I just didn’t think it would take me this long to write it. I’d hoped to finish it last week but I never got myself into writing gear long enough to crank it out. This is my mission this week, to crank it out. The story is brainstormed and plotted, I just have to write it.
Project: Secret Life of a Sex Blogger
Genre: romance
Type: novella
Progress: The title says it all, honestly. I had this idea and I’m doing some ground work to research it. I want to write a non-white heroine, which makes me nervous, but I think there needs to be a little less vanilla in my literature.
Project: The Revenge of Baba Yaga
Genre: Fantasy/Horror
Type: novel?
Progress: I’m skeptical if this will ever be completed. What happened was I took a Steampunk workshop last month and brainstormed a Russian steampunk story using traditional fairy tales and the degradation of magic as steam technology pushes it aside and people move on. Since it was already on the dark side I used it for my horror workshop to create a more horror type story. We had to write the opening scenes and submit them to the class. A little nerve wracking, but I’m happy with what I produced. Now will I ever write the story? I don’t know.
What I read.
We Kill Dead Things by Sommer Marsden- Eat Slay Love by Jesse Petersen (OMG the book rocks, but I keep flipping back a few chapters and rereading them and moving forward. It never takes me this long to read a book, but between wanting to reread it already and all the crazy Other Stuff going on it’s taking me ages to read anything!)
ROW 80 Check In
I’m going t do a proper check in this week. I’ve been blogging less so I might as well do the proper check in, right? No excuses!
Okay, this last week was the kick off of the Savvy Author’s Boot Camp, which translates to uber focused writing and editing time. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow when I do my big weekly check in.
ROW 80 Goals…
1. Finish Casual Love
Done, and done, and done! I need to write a new beginning for it but I’m not ready for that. I’m still exhausted from just writing it. I’m kind of hoping that the last week of May I will have the three stories I have slated to write for the boot camp done and I can churne out a new beginning then, but in the meantime I should probably read over the book so I get a better handle on what exactly it is I need to establish in the beginning of the book. This is more on the revising of this book, but oh well.
2. Finish at least two short stories.
These are more like novellas. The first one I wrote, Rescue Me, is out making the critique rounds. I told the group origionally two weeks and realized that with the boot camp I should wait until June, so in a monthish I’ll circle back to this and work on it again. I have a general plan for the siblings of the sister introduced in this story in case I can write the whole family.
Decoy is what I’ve been working on in the last week. It’s pretty awesome. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.
3. Do writerly things every day.
This last week was a return to the dedicated mentality of doing things every day. Yeah, I felt guilty for the two weeks I was laying around reading all the time but I needed that. It was writerly in that I needed my ‘word tank’ refilled. It wasn’t obviously writing or revising or whatever time, but it’s still an important part of being a writer. And I’m okay with that. This last week though has seen me at the computer until all hours of the night getting in those words and pages!
4. Juggle revisions and writing.
The boot camp has made this really happen. I revise during the day at lunch or before work, and then write and blog at night. It’s really working out well. The revision project this last week was a fantasy book I wrote last year called Maliginus. I’ve been writing on Decoy. Last night I did a quick pass through a short story I wrote during NaNo called Gentleman Pirates and Lady Smugglers. Sometimes I really surprise myself with my writing. All things are awesome!
Writing in a Zombie World & Drawing on Pop Culture Sources
So it’s Day 3 of the Boot Camp, second month of ROW 80, and I’m writing this blog way in advance so it’s kind of confusing for me.
Also, May is National Zombie Awareness Month. So be aware of zombies.
My first project for the boot camp is a novella called Decoy. I started it during last year’s Story a Day in May. I wanted to do something with zombies that embraced that lifestyle, daring danger and being reckless. I picked it up a few weeks ago and decided to go for a real plot this time. I always like writing zombie stuff, and I’m all for using other sources of inspiration. With zombies it’s getting harder and harder to twist the story to make it new and exciting, which is why this idea drew me back after almost a year. It’s the characters and their motivation that’s really special.
Since Friday I’ve been rewatching the tv show, The Walking Dead. I started watching it in the fall, but thanks to NaNo I never really watched it. As a side note, season 2 has been set for October of this year – yahoo!
The story I have planned is nothing like the show, but drawing on something from the genre I’m writing in is handy. I can see how society is translated into that situation. I’m not writing a zombie breakout story like The Walking Dead, I’m writing a post-rising story more in line of how Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series.
Because I’m embracing the whole, write what you know, my zombie story is done Texas style. If you’re not from Texas, heck, even if you aren’t American you’re still probably aware of the distinct Texas pride. It’s like they inject it into us at birth.
Since Texas was its own country prior to joining the US, there is still a certain juvenile glee in the idea that we could theoretically survive as our own country. There is an entire sect of people who believe that Texas was never even legally admitted into the USA. People in Texas believe strongly in owning guns, protecting our property, and independence.
In the event of a zombie infested world, there’s no other place in the country I would rather live. So my little zombie story is set in an independent Texas. Castle Laws are key. Overall it’s not a bad place to live as far as zombie infestations go.
But what about the zombies? Reading books like Warm Bodies, or the Newsflesh books, or Married With Zombies show you the history of how the zombies came to be. The zombies in Warm Bodies are created thanks to our culture. In both the Newsflesh and Married With Zombie trilogies the zombies are the product of a virus. Still yet in the Half-Past Dead anthology, Zoe Archer’s zombies were spiritual. In Night of the Living Trekkies they’re aliens. Movies run the gauntlet of zombies too. From the Resident Evil kind to the 28 Days/Weeks Later, Zombieland or any other series.
The overall accepted source of a zombie outbreak is medical these days. I think that of the above examples Zombieland is the only one that doesn’t explain how or why the zombies happened. If the movie wasn’t so funny it might be the most frightening one on the list for exactly that reason. Not knowing makes us see shadows where there aren’t any, monsters out of nothing.
There’s nothing wrong with knowing the established norms of a genre. I know that if I write my zombies as being the product of a plague, virus, aliens, or a spiritual something I’m in good company.
Different zombie cultures have abilities others do not. The Night of the Living Trekkies zombies have a hive mind. 28 Days/Weeks Later zombies are stronger, faster, and frightening. Resident Evil zombies evolve, become new things the longer they’re infected and consume. Some zombies can open doors, communicate, and perform some basic functions while others can only move forward. In Bianca D’Arc’s zombie paranormal romances the zombies develop claws because after death hair and nails continue to grow.
Don’t ask me why zombies fascinate me, they just do. It’s probably sick and twisted how much I enjoy creating a new zombie infested world, but I do. I think I enjoy the research the most.
What media outlets do you use for inspiration?
Goals: Participating in group challenges.
This month I’m talking about something super important to me as a writer: Goals! So far we’ve discussed the importance of goals, setting achievable goals, keeping ourselves accountable, giving yourselves deadlines, and rebounding from goal-depression. Whew! Today I want to talk about something I touched on when I talked about accountability. Today is all about group challenges.
I’m a highly competitive person. Putting me head to head with someone else when I think I can win is a guaranteed way to make me double my efforts. You can set up challenges with your friends or people you know. My friends and I actually met thanks to a writing challenge, NaNoWriMo. These group efforts stir up a lot of encouragement and frenzy to do things.
Here’s a list of writing challenges that can help you meet your goals:
- #1k1hr – These are sprints done on Twitter. This isn’t so much a challenge as a way to make a focused effort on writing for a solid hour with the end goal being to have written 1,000 words. You can do these at any time, just twitter with the hash tag!
- NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month is a division of Office of Letters and Light that challenges participants to write 50,000 words in a month. Many people who have never written a novel join NaNo and write more than they’ve ever written in their life. This is held annually in November. The OLL team has a NaNoWriMo forum, and volunteers that moderate each region, setting up local events for writers. It’s very exciting!
- Story a Day in May – This is going on it’s second year in 2011. The challenge is to write a short story a day, every day in May. I’m not participating in it this year, but I’m going to be sponsoring a prompt challenge.
- April Fools – This is similar to NaNoWriMo, but smaller. Participants can set their own goals. There is a forum, but it lacks the regional face-to-face interaction.
- A Round of Words in 80 Days – This just started on April 4th. Participants sign up on the blog and create their own goals. Unlike the other challenges that have goals set for you, you set your own.
- Savvy Author Boot Camp (paying members only ) – I recently signed up for a Savvy membership. In May they are separating us into teams of about five people, and we write or edit pages. The team who does the most wins a workshop credit.
Do you know of any other writing challenges?
Less Blogging
I’ve had a pretty hefty blogging schedule on here these last few months. It’s been awesome, but it’s also exhausting. Since I’m doing A Round of Words in 80 Days, Savvy Author’s May Boot Camp & June Revision Hell, blogging will suffer. I have a very light blogging series to do in May, but I’m going to give myself permission to slack off on the blogging.
This does not mean that my demands on myself are changing. In fact, after a seriously lax month of little writing, lots of reading, and not much to show for it I want to kick it back into high gear and do stuff. I’m not going to be working on what I wanted to work on, but oh well. I’m accepting that. I need to read up on stuff and do research. When I’m finished with that I plan to do a blog series about stuff I learned from the research.
Well, this is enough rambling from me.
ROW 80 Check-In
This is a difficult blog for me to write. When this challenge started I had a clear cut idea of where I wanted to go, but the best laid plans – well, you know how the saying goes.
So here’s what my goals were:
- Finish Casual Love
- Write Little Spirits
- Finish at least two short stories
- Write every day
- Juggle revisions and writing
And here’s what they are now:
- Finish Casual Love
- Finish at least two short stories
- Do writerly things every day (writing or revising or research)
- Juggle revisions and writing
I’m going to write more than two short stories. For the Savvy May Boot Camp I’m going to be emptying my idea closet and doing a lot of short stories/novellas to use some of these ideas. I’m hopeful that I’ll get through two to four short stories and perhaps a draft of Derby Girls or Space Particle.
I’m changing the #3 goal to writerly things because I have spent a lot of time revising, which is not necessarily adding words. The idea behind that goal was to develop the daily writer’s habit, not just to be a word factory.
So do you find yourself altering your goals to fit your needs?
Weekly Check-in!
I’m halfway through April, and I’m already thinking about May! I spent my lunch break on Friday listing out what I wanted to do the rest of this month and then everything I thought I could do in May. It’s a lot of finishing up half started projects right now and editing. My classes are going well. This is my first week of full classes. I’m taking three. One is a Alternative History and Steampunk class. Then there is a Self-Editing class being taught by Angela James from CarinaPress. Lastly, I’m taking a class on Adding Humor to your Manuscript. All in all, it’s keeping me busy!
I got a little bogged down this week so there were two days when I bucked the list of things I planned on doing and opted to just read instead. Sometimes you have to just know when you are stretched thin or burning out and take that step back and recharge.
Blogging.
I’m happy to say that I’ve almost written all of my blog posts for the month. All of the goals ones at least. I still need to clean them up, make a few more examples, and fill in the links but they’re looking really good. I’m very glad that I’m knocking these out of the water.
This weekend I started thinking about my May blogging and I might start writing those soon.
Revising.
This week was a lot about revising. First up, I was reading and working through an old manuscript called Abs-olutely. The first fifty pages are good. After that I feel like it becomes a mess. I’m not looking to ever do anything with this manuscript but my friends wanted the chance to read it. So I’m going through and cutting out some things, cleaning up the spelling and grammar. In a few places I’m rewriting the scenes. It’s not a clean manuscript at all, but the ideas are there. I finished it up on Friday. Here’s hoping it gives my friends a good laugh!
Rescue Me is on the cutting board. I’ve started going through it with the tips and tricks I’m learning in the self-editing workshop I’m taking. I think the story is already much stronger from pruning the unnecessary things I wrote in on the zero draft. I hit a point with it this weekend though and handed it over to my friend Suzan to look over and give me some suggestions. Here’s hoping they don’t hurt too much!
Blood Bound is a challenge. Won’t lie. I need to write more new scenes, but with the story being so complicated it’s hard to write this anywhere but when I’m at home. I wanted to be so much closer to being done with this project, but I’m not there yet.
Plotting.
I completely missed my Warrior Writer Boot Camp deadline on Wednesday. I was waffling between revising characters and doing the major plot points. I pretty much never decided and missed the deadline because I wouldn’t make up my mind. I’m going to make an effort this weekend to revising the characters profiles and jotting down the major plot points.
Writing.
Writing for now is on the back burner. I’m mostly editing and revising and working on class stuff.
Project: Decoy
Genre: romance
Type: novella
Progress: I’ve been sitting on an idea for a zombie story for a while. There was an anthology that I was trying to write the idea for, but it didn’t work out. Basically I was focusing on too many projects and it slipped through the cracks. Last week Suzan pointed me to a Carina Press blog where one of the editors said she wished that someone would send her some zombie hunter romance. Well, I thought it was a great opportunity to grab Isabella and Ty out of the drawer and work on their story. It’s coming along very slowly because I’m focused on editing, but I’m excited about it.
What I read.
- Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
- Once Bitten, Twice Dead by Bianca D’Arc
- Doubleblind by Ann Aguirre
ROW 80
I’m having the uncomfortable position of asking myself if I need to revise my ROW80 goals. Currently my goals are:
- Finish Casual Love
- Write Little Spirits
- Finish at least two short stories
- Write every day
- Juggle revisions and writing
I think #2 needs to go. I was hoping to write Little Spirits during the Savvy Author’s May Boot Camp, but I don’t think I’m ready. My Writing Horror workshop is in May, I haven’t read even half of my ghost hunting resources, and I feel like I need more prep work, so that is officially on the block to get cut.
As far as the rest of it, I finished writing Casual Love. I’ve completed one short story. I’m knee deep in another one I’m very excited about. I’ve also written and edited every day for the last two months and I’m still going strong!
I’m thinking that I’m going to swap out writing Little Spirits for finishing Derby Girls Are Dangerous and Space Particle, both are stories I wrote half of during NaNoWriMo ’11. I’m not saying that for certain, I’ll wait until I’m closer to May, but that’s where I think this is heading.
Weekly Check-In
This last week has been all about high notes. I knew that this last week was kinda ‘my week’. I was going to succeed with flying colors, I just hadn’t realized how amazingly I was going to do. I’m still flying high from my success, but I might be nose diving pretty soon. *bites finger nails*
Blogging.
I was doing soooo well at blogging ahead of time. Now, I’m lucky if I have my blogs done a week ahead. *sigh* I have the topics and place holder posts for future blogs with the idea jotted down in the body of the post, but I have to come back the week or even the night before and write the dang things. I need to get back into the jive of having the blogs written out way in advance.
I kicked off my Goals series this week, and on Friday talked about the importance of goals. This coming week I’m going to talk about setting realistic goals and keeping yourself accountable. Both are easy to talk about, and very difficult to put into practice. I foresee a lot of self deprecating stories when I sit down to write those blogs…
Revising.
This has been moved to urgent status this week. As of Tuesday, I’m in a revising and editing class. Because I decided to take an extra week to finish Casual Love, which I talk about below, I have lost a week of revisions. I’m diving back into Blood Bound to revise and polish it. I really love the story, and I think there’s more there to tell. So I’m writing new scenes, explaining stuff that was crammed into the story too tightly by the word count restriction and beefing up the story. I hope to take a week to write new scenes and then two weeks to edit and fine tune those scenes before I hand it off to other people for critiques. Is that a tight schedule? Yes, but I’m hoping that I can do it in that time because the Savvy Authors May Boot Camp is looming on the horizon and I want to be turning out wordcounts and not pages edited. If, in the end, I need more editing time I will take it.
I put in a lot of revising and editing on Sunday. I read through the draft of Blood Bound, made notes of where I thought stuff needed to be added and then set about writing the new introduction. I was struggling with a way of laying out the world building and introducing some complicated issues without info dumping. It’s still kinda an info dump, but it’s done in a different, less dumpy way. I’m tentatively hopeful.
Last year I wrote a paranormal romance called Absolutely, about werewolves. It’s never going to be publishable. The idea just isn’t interesting enough, but I’m doing a quick and dirty pass so I can at least share it with my friends and let them read this strange tale. It’s better than I had anticipated, but not good enough to warrant me doing more with it. I’m a third of the way through the draft, which is twice as far as I thought I would get today. I expect it to get more involved as far as cleaning it up from here on out.
Plotting.
I started working my novel idea, Little Spirits, towards being YA. I’m really loving where the story is going, and even more excited about it than I was to begin with. The difficulty is that I want to write this for the May Boot Camp, and still take it through the Warrior Writer Boot Camp process. Those are conflicting goals since honestly they can’t coexist. You know what I’m going to do anyways? Proceed with the WWBC process and start the draft May 1st anyways. It’s not a great idea, since I’m still pretty fuzzy on the plot, but I’m impatient and I know myself.
So my project for the next week is to revamp the protagonist profiles, do quick and dirty profiles for their siblings and parents and the minor characters. Next Saturday I’m supposed to be doing the main plot points of my story, but I think I’m going to lapse a week and allow the group to have a breather and look over the revamped profiles and the down and dirty synopsis I want to write.
Writing.
Ya ready for this? Really ready?
Project:Formerly Fat Club: Casual Love
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Type: novel
Progress: It’s finished! I’m still floating on air. I’ll come down soon, but I’m still excited and happy and yea!
I also finished a short story! Yea! I haven’t talked about these short story projects much because I’m leaning heavily towards submitting them to be published under a pen name, for many reasons actually. These are fun side projects that if I can sell them, I will, but mostly I write them because I want to get an idea out of my head and they’re fun.
What I read.
- Wolf Mates 2-4 by Dakota Cassidy
- The Ex-Files by Dakota Cassidy
- Dark Enchantment by Anya Bast
- Bound by Blood by Cynthia Eden
#ROW80
If you don’t know, I’m participating in the A Round of Words in 80 Days challenge. I’m being a rebel and doing my weekly updates on Mondays because I’m old and set in my blogging ways. *brandishes cane* Actually I rarely post on the weekends so the Sunday check in was out, and I had already promised to blog on topics on Wednesdays so it just made sense to combine it. Anyways!
How did I do towards my ROW80 goals this week?
- This week, like I said above, I finished Casual Love, which was #1 on my goals.
- I finished a short story. My goal is to finish two, so I’m halfway to that goal!
- I wrote every day.
