The Inaugural Weekly Round Up
This is the first of my new weekly round up posts that I'll be using to chronicle this writing journey of mine. Thanks again to David Goodman and his daily write-ups for the inspiration. Right now, I plan on keeping this to just a few sections to help keep it organized:
My Writing Week - updates about what I worked on this past week
Life will Life - As I mentioned in my confession, life will life. Things come up, good, bad, and ugly. I'll share what's going on in my world outside of this craziness
What I'm Enjoying - Could range from books I love, movie's I've watched, to songs I've played on repeat so often Spotify is starting to worry about me
What's Up Next - things I plan on tackling over the next week
As I go on, I may tweak here and there but I'll always do my best to keep these short and sweet, no more than about 1000 words or a 5-minute read.
Enjoy!
My Writing Week
The biggest thing I've been focused on this past week is actually launching this. Figuring out what my cadence will be to keep myself honest without overcommitting. I really enjoyed writing my confession and my goal of finally taking my writing serious. It was cathartic to get it all out, all the gross bits I've internalized up to this point. I won't lie to you, publishing it was a bit nerve wracking because once it's out there, there is no taking it back. I'm glad that I did it.
For my WIP, I'll call it GRAY for now, I am taking a hard look at what I have of the 40k words so far and seeing what's, well, usable. I've started and stopped it so much over the last year and half that it's this frankensteined hodgepodge of a story. I think there is a ton there that is usable and will set me up for a good path to finishing it hopefully by the end of the year, but being in sales I know that November and December will get crazy for me, so realistically my goal is to have it done by my birthday next March.
Life will Life
I won't lie to you dear reader, I'm tired. I am very blessed to have two little boys. That said, my youngest, 18-Month, is going through a nasty sleep regression/teething/separation anxiety/who the heck actually knows so I'm running on about three hours of sleep as I write this on Wednesday. Normally this is where I would use that as an excuse, flip through my phone and say, "I'll write tomorrow." Not today though!
My family and I moved into our house about four years ago, when we knew we would be trying for the 18M, and since then I've had one corner of my office very clean for Zoom work calls, the rest a certifiable dumpster of stacked books, and knick knacks everywhere, essentially never unpacking the room. Well, my wife being the amazing supporter she is, convinced me it was time. While I don't want to be precious about where I write, she wasn't wrong that the previous set up didn't exactly lend itself to the most creative of environments. So following along with every other DIY influencer on the planet, I made the quick drive down to Charlotte, picked up a couple of Billy bookshelves from Ikea and voila:
What I'm Enjoying
I'm not the fastest reader in the world, I am good for about three books a month, maybe four if I get a hold of one that I skip meals for. That, plus my talent for content adding books in bulk to my TBR pile (all of the books on the shelf next to the door above), meant that it has taken me a while to get to all of the wonderful books I picked up at ThrillerFest this past May.
I recently finished RUN, WE WOULD NEVER TELL, and THE EMBASSY MURDERS, all outstanding reads and each offering something different. Excited to get to the rest of these over the coming weeks/months.
The other reason it's taken me so long to get to these books is that I have certain authors who are automatic buy's, drop everything I am doing and read immediately authors. Chief among them is Charles Cumming, whose book TRINITY SIX was one of the three seminal books that made me want to take the leap into writing fiction in the first place. His most recent release, ICARUS 17, is the fourth in his ongoing Box 88. While the other books in the Box series are told in two timelines, following the main character in present day and in the 90's, I17 is present day only with two distinct POVs as the main character races against time to save his ex-girlfriend's son who is being chased through Greece. Highly recommend.
What's Up Next
My wife and I are headed to New York City for a long weekend away, eating our way through the city over the next 72 hours. It's a much needed vacation and I can't wait to leave my work laptop at home, the first time I will have done so all year.
On the writing side, while I am still wading through what I've written, I have a clearer understanding of what is working with the 40k words (probably closer to 20k when it's all said and done), so I am planning to use the rest of the month of September to do exactly that: plan. I went to school for filmmaking with an emphasis on screenwriting and directing and one of the things I learned about my process early on was that if I didn't have a treatment, if I didn't know where the story was going, I would flounder writing the script. And yet, with all of these failed books in the past, I maybe knew a couple of plot points and wrongly trusted myself to "feel the way through" to the rest. So I plan on sitting down and really ironing out in a treatment the book as I see it. I'll leave room to wander a bit, let the characters take me to unexpected places, but I'll have my roadmap to get back on track if I ever start to lose grip of the story.