ROW80 April 10 Check-in

Official Round of Words in 80 Days site.

So not a lot has happened since the last check-in, except I decided to re-orient how I do these check-in things. Rather than go day by day, which invariably results in some pretty boring commentary about my day-to-day life, I'd rather just talk about how each of my projects is going between check-ins. Cool? Cool.

To recap, these projects include:
1. Zombies!! Full-length novel. The plan is to complete 50,000 words of the manuscript by the end of ROW80
2. 101 short-story. The plan is to have this first draft finished by the end of ROW80
3. Write 5,000 words total each week, split up however I want between these two projects.
4. Take a picture every day!

Zombies!!: So, things have been progressing nicely for Zombies!! and I think the entirety of my word count total for this week came from that (which says something about how short-story writing is going for my perennially short-story-phobic brain, but more on that later). I am currently 9,000 words into the manuscript, although I should provide a little bit of a caveat to that number and say that around half of that was written before ROW80 even started, and that most of these 9,000 words are essentially 2nd, 3rd or even 4th drafts of things I have already written in the past. There are a few areas where I have literally just lifted passages of texts that existed in earlier incarnations of this project. So the numbers for this first section are a bit misleading, but even taking that into account, this is going smoothly. Since last check-in, I have added a total of 3,100 words to the manuscript, although like I mentioned before some of that was technically written before. I am just getting to the point where I can move beyond where previous “drafts” of this have left off, so that’s quite exciting.

101: Now that this project is no longer a shiny new idea, I have started to realize that, oh, okay, I need to actually be getting at something with this, and so far I just haven’t hit upon what that is. So this project has been a little stagnant this week, but I haven’t lost hope or interest. I feel like I just need to wait and be patient to figure out what is tying this thing together. So far it stands at a loopy, disjointed 1,500 words.

Pic-A-Day: My picture-diary project is going swimmingly. I have held true this week and taken (at least) one picture every day, including a bunch of this nice drive I took with some friends last Sunday (technically before ROW80 started I guess but oh well!) Pictures can be perused on my Tumblr. They’re kind of mixed in with some other silly things, most of which have very little to do with my actual life, so there’s an interesting juxtaposition there.

Before I go try to tackle today’s writing session, I just want to quickly thank any and all of you fellow-ROWers (and any non ROWers) who have stumbled onto this little blog. Thanks for giving me a read, and thanks to everyone who has popped in to give me words of encouragement! I am trying to be a little more open about reaching out to people in this crazy world, and that includes internet-people too! So I may be stopping by some other ROW blogs and I might just leave a comment or two.