It's Wednesday again. Isn't it funny how that happens every week right on schedule? Amazing. Anyway, with Wednesday comes Work in Progress Wednesday time.If anyone else out there in the blogosphere wants to join in on the fun, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.
For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.
It's been a pretty slow week on the progress front here. I am in the middle of revising chapter four right now. As I mentioned in my previous post, an unexpected visit from my friends pulled me off course a little bit, but to be completely honest even before they showed up on my doorstep things were not moving as quickly as I wanted.
I think part of the problem is that it is difficult to set goals like I did while writing my first draft. My 500 words a day goal forced me to produce words even when I didn't want to, but the amount of work accomplished while working on revisions and rewrites is more difficult to count. Sometimes I'll spend a whole hour just reading through a chapter and trying to identify the major problems. Then I need to figure out how to fix those problems, and sometimes that requires me to check my email five hundred times while I try and figure it out. Suddenly, it's time for bed and I've deleted a little bit, typed a little bit, but don't have that, "Ahhh, I really accomplished something" feeling that helps me to sleep at night.
So, it's a bit frustrating because I am at that point where I feel like I am sooooooo close, and yet so far away. I think this is where the temptation can come in for a writer to send out a rough draft to an agent or publisher, just wanting to move onto that next part and make something happen. This however, would be a very very bad thing, and when that kind of temptation comes over me, I just remind myself that I still need to write a query letter and that usually squelches the impulse pretty quickly.
Anyway, for the coming weeks I am going to give myself the goal of getting through one chapter a day. This week that will be especially difficult as we are moving from our apartment of three years into a nice little rental house. While it is very exciting to be getting out of our apartment where the horrible downstairs neighbors pound on their ceiling/our floor to let us know when they think we are walking too loudly, it is also going to be a time consuming endeavor. Not only do we have to pack up all our stuff and move it across town, but we have the extra level of difficulty of having to do so with a toddler. Yeah, my son is not quite two , but he already seems to have a pretty good handle on the whole terrible thing.
Anyway, sometimes life gets in the way of writing, so the second half of my goal is to not beat myself up too much over how much I am not getting done, and instead focus on what I do get accomplished.
Finally, if you missed my last post, I am also running a writing analogy contest this week. I want your best analogy about the writing process. You can compare coming up with new topics to blog about, with trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Or you can get creative in describing how you try to get that first draft down, tackling rewrites, pinning down a query, or anything else that you can come up with.
The prize is this really cool book called "i never metaphor i didn't like", and also more importantly bragging rights and the totally meaningless award pictured below:
Yes, I made that award myself with my rudimentary Photoshop skills (so rudimentary, in fact, that I did not even use Photoshop because that program just confuses me. No, I used a little program I call "Photoshop for dummies" aka Microsoft Picture It! The exclamation mark is theirs, not mine.)And that's it for my WIP Wednesday. Now you tell me, how is your WIP progressing?
