Week of 15 January to 21 January
When I set a notional goal of two chapters per month for the Impressions project, I knew it was a conservative goal. There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to setting word count goals: some people think you should set a goal at the limit of your capability, or even above it, so that you are encouraged to write as much as you possibly can, while other people think it’s better to be realistic, or even under-estimate. The latter is my preference, because while I know that I can always keep writing more, I find it quite discouraging to be constantly missing my goals. So, instead of telling you I’m behind, I can tell you that I’m now working on two chapters ahead of my projected schedule. Since chapter three ended up at about 4500 words, that puts the total count at about twelve thousand words – in other words, comparable to a monthly Blood Magic episode.
I’m still struggling with how to rewrite the idea I have for January’s Elegant Literature contest. I’ve now tried it as epistolary, as an in-world artifact, and as a traditional narrative, so we’ll see what I come up with to try next week. It really does need to be my focus next week, though, or it won’t be ready for the deadline. It might not have helped that I was distracted from it by the Lord of the Levain story, which after a few false starts is starting to come together. I don’t know if it’s going to be a successful comedy, but I’m enjoying writing it, and I think it has some decent humor in it.
Plus, I wrote two blog posts and two book reviews this week, keeping me from falling behind (only in my world is being scheduled out to May getting behind). If you follow me on Goodreads, you can see my reviews nearer to real-time relative to when I read books, if you don’t want to wait for them to come out on IGC Publishing.
I debated this week submitted In My Defense to a few places, but did not pull the trigger, mostly because I started overthinking it, as I so often do. Likely, I just need to bite the proverbial bullet and submit the story, instead of overanalyzing, which should help overcome whatever remaining mental hurdle I have about submitting stories unsolicited. I mean, they’re solicited in calls for submissions, but I think you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a post about that.
For this week, we’ll be talking about stoicism on Tuesday in a bit of a follow-up to Meditations. Our Thursday review will be for Diné Bahaneʼ, which was an absolutely fascinating book – we’ll be talking about some of its ideas for several posts to come. If you’re not familiar, you could look it up, or better yet, read the review on Thursday and then go find yourself a copy. That’s all for now, but I’ll be back next week with another update.
IGC Publishing 