Week of 19 February to 25 February
Kind of a slow writing week this week, so this will be a brief update. I spent a lot of the time that I should have spent on writing reading instead, so I didn’t make nearly as much progress as I should have: namely, I did not finish chapter seven. Oh, I made decent progress on it, and got through the first two scenes, but I still have at least two thousand words to add to it. Part of that is that, after an initially good start, it became slower going. I’ve noticed that when I attempt to plot out where exactly I want a given chapter to go in too much detail, I end up struggling more to get there. It’s like it becomes harder to write all of the small details and conversations that make the story come to life when I’m too focused on the story’s structure.
Progress is progress, though, and I’ll keep working at chapter seven this week – hopefully, I’ll finish it and start on chapter eight. I also need to get Ship in a Bottle submitted before February 28th – I did another two revision passes on it, and it’s in good shape, but I haven’t yet submitted it because of some unresolved storytelling decisions – I’ll talk more about those in an eventual author’s note post (which I’ll post even if the story itself should somehow be accepted and published in the contest instead of here on the site).
Next week’s Tuesday post will discuss George Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language,” but don’t be scared off by the word ‘politics,’ since this is in no way a political post in the modern deployment of that term. Thursday’s book review is for Mysteries of the Middle Ages, another book, like The Time Traveler’s Guide, that makes for excellent research material for those of us attempting to evoke a medieval time period. I owe you some more detailed updates and news in the near future, but for now, I’ll leave you with the usual encouragement to follow the site to stay up to date, and of course I’ll be back next week with another of these weekly writing updates.
IGC Publishing 