Posts Tagged Anthology

Interesting week, these last seven days.

• Won a contest I didn’t enter – tangible prize and everything (yay!).  The original contest I entered rolled into another contest, which was pretty cool.  Thank you to Lee Crystal and Outpost 13.
• Played drums at church for the third time in 12 1/2 years.  I had told the worship leader that I don’t like to play music that’s in 3/4 time, just 4/4.  Well, there were three 3/4 songs, one 6/8 song, one 4/4 song (yay!), and one song that had a repeated pattern of five measures of 5/4 time and then one measure of 3/4 time.  The worship pastor hates me.  I know it, deep down he hates me.  It was so stressful.  I was told by many people that I did great, but I still want to crawl under a rock to recover.
• Finished Diamond of Darkhold (which finishes one series I’ve been reading), reading Jumper: Griffin’s Story (which finishes another series for me), and have The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner in the queue (which will finish that series, again).
• Decided I am going back to school next year for a Master’s… unless something unforeseen comes up.  I have off-and-on wanted to go back to school for four years now.  I’m finally at the point where I am willing to dedicate the time and energy.
• Made five commitments on my time this weekend, overlapping commitments.  It will be interesting to see how I survive.  Two weeks ago I didn’t have many weekend plans and it was the busiest weekend I can remember.  Maybe the one will work the other way around.
• Finished one round of edits on a short story for the FSFW anthology.  Some friends, C. Michael Fontes and P. D. Wright gave me a little feedback and, as improved as it was, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Like many aspiring writers, I have a normal job – a day job that pays the bills.  I leave the house for nearly 11 hours a day when you count in commute and lunch.  This means I don’t have a lot of time to write or edit.  Before the baby I would write about 500 words a day and not every day.  An average week for me was 2000 words and a really good week was 3000.  In the last two weeks leading up the birth of my son and the first two after, I wrote only 1500 total words – 1500 words in one month.  I told you that to tell you something else.

Yesterday I wrote 2500 words.  2500!  I know there are a lot of writers that do a lot more, you may be one of them – good for you, you little braggart.  This post is about me. 

The reason for so much production was the anthology.  The original date for rough drafts to be submitted for review was last night.  We have since moved that date out a week, but I still wanted to make the first goal.  I wanted to do it because I was wondering if I still had it in me to write.  One month is a long dry spell and I was worried. 

I was 4000 words into my short a month ago and 5500 words just yesterday morning.  I wanted to finish.  I had thought about the story many a times while commuting, cuddling my baby, or doing any number of other tasks, but I hadn’t had the chance to put pen to paper (or hand to keyboard). 

Yesterday I started at 6:50 am.  Every time I looked at the clock I would say to myself: “17 hours left”, “9 and a half hours left”, “1 hour 22 minutes left.”  The pressure felt good.  The writing felt good.  I submitted just before the original deadline (I actually had another week).  I haven’t looked over the last 2500 words, they may be trash, but I wrote.  I wrote, I submitted, and I made my goal.  For that I am happy.

The last two days have been good to me. 

• I have edited two pages of The Open Door and have written about a thousand words on my anthology entry.  The anthology entry is a dooms day story. 
• I had my yearly eval at work.  Everything looked good.  I am still employed.
• Lis has not been having the contractions close enough together to make us sit by a clock timing and wondering, unlike Tuesday morning where we lived by the clock for a while.