Update 9: 3-9 August

Hurricane Isiah

Well… that was unplanned. Last week, we had a zero-word count, because of reasons… mostly because I just went into an uncreative funk. But this week I was determined to make a rebound. I even gave myself a bunch of goals that weren’t totally based on word count.

Then on Tuesday we got his with the edge of a hurricane. I want to stress EDGE… not the direct center of the bloody thing but just the edge. My work lost power and I went home slightly early. I drive home with wind and rain driving me from side to side on the highway. Trees were falling apart on either side of the highway. Branches and leaves pelting my car.

It was stressful and by the time I arrived home I was shaken and felt… off. The storm pounded for another three hours and then petered out. Everything was fine. All was well, and at 7 pm I was on my laptop and about to start a gaming session of D&D on Roll20.

At 7:30 pm the power went out. I stress the rain and the wind was over. It was calm and quiet. Everything died.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Except… it was more than 50 hours of dark…

My work didn’t get power back until Wednesday night, and I didn’t get power back at home until Friday morning. So, on the good side I got a whole novel read while I was shut down from writing or school work. Then when I had power at work, I needed to spend all of my time cranking out the school work.

But it is not another ZERO week!

WORDS

First off, last week I mentioned that I needed to figure out the outline for the next few chapters. To that end, I managed on Monday to use Scrivener to create new corkboard entries.

I created 8 new chapters, and this morning I managed to get in a word count on the first of them, chapter 16. Got in 2003 words, bringing the WIP up to 62,720. I have a long way to go but I now have a good map to get there.

I also changed it to be color coded based on the POV of each chapter.

The Story so Far:

I have had my fun with the great train robbery and now I have all of my characters on their respective paths.

Caitlyn is entering the Ashlands and giving me the vehicle (pun intended) to showcase my world building and bring in history, anthropology, and religion/mythology. To be honest I think I’m enjoying writing her story the most, and of all the storylines in the novel, hers is the one that could have been crafted into a singular novel.

Rune is getting his marines moving but also learning that Imperial criminals might have escaped justice and become warlords in the Ashlands. He is heading to the main component of his character growth, where he decides to put aside his personal goals and needs to allow someone else to reach their goal. Denying his selfish pleasure is his turning point.

Keegan and Slater and Nemo are prisoners of the Mantis (which here, and only here I will admit are based on the Thrikreen from D&D). I’m heading to the point where Nemo changes his whole life around and creates a paradox… (this was a narrative detail that was created during workshopping and writing out my outline for previous classes).

What’s Happening in my Classes

We only have three weeks left of this term. It’s a little crazy to think its almost over. Then the next 22 weeks are purely spent on writing my thesis. Meaning I need to up my word counts per session and per week.

This week I have a discussion, a little reading, a workshop, and one essay/editing assignment to write. It should be a fairly light week to be honest. I want to try and get in a good 3-5000 words as well. Let’s see how it goes.