A little less than a year ago, I gave myself the deadline of the last day of 2013 to finish the first draft of Spirit. The finished first draft. I already have a couple unfinished first drafts. My goal was to have something I could put to bed as the year closed and open again when spring was emerging to (re)read and edit and then send on to betas.
I was pretty much on target. Through the chaos of kid schedules and my Sweetie going back to school full time around a full time work schedule, I'd eked out a routine that included dedicated writing time and progress was indeed happening - word count on Spirit was over 100k and I could see the here-to-the-end storyline.
And then there was November.
The week before Thanksgiving to be specific.
When the power went out. Twice. In one day. And when it came back on, it surged through the 1950's wiring in my house and killed my work PC, monitor, and backup battery.
The culprit, as it turns out, was a squirrel that'd committed harikari with a transformer around the corner.
My moniker being Skwirrel from my haunts around the web, this was particularly amusing in my world. In an ironic, I'm-laughing-so-you-don't-see-me-cry kind of way.
Due to a number of things, including the tech limitations of work software and a budget already looking at holiday expenses and the initiation of orthodontia, my laptop, previously used for writing and other personal stuff, had to be recruited for the paycheck job.
Which translates to expensive software being loaded onto my laptop over the course of a week and subsequently my laptop being chained to the house instead of traipsing around town with me to various kid appointments and practices, where a lot of my writing used to happen.
The paycheck job took priority and the progress on the story dropped to a crawl. A handwritten crawl.
And the goal of finishing by the close of '13 diminished to a faint hope before it died altogether.
The second week of the year is staring me in the face and the climax of my scene is just starting. I'm thinking the story has around another 20k words until the last two - The End.
I'm hoping to finish it before school lets out for summer in May.
With any luck, the squirrels stay out of the wiring until then.
At least.
-L
I was pretty much on target. Through the chaos of kid schedules and my Sweetie going back to school full time around a full time work schedule, I'd eked out a routine that included dedicated writing time and progress was indeed happening - word count on Spirit was over 100k and I could see the here-to-the-end storyline.
And then there was November.
The week before Thanksgiving to be specific.
When the power went out. Twice. In one day. And when it came back on, it surged through the 1950's wiring in my house and killed my work PC, monitor, and backup battery.
The culprit, as it turns out, was a squirrel that'd committed harikari with a transformer around the corner.
My moniker being Skwirrel from my haunts around the web, this was particularly amusing in my world. In an ironic, I'm-laughing-so-you-don't-see-me-cry kind of way.
Due to a number of things, including the tech limitations of work software and a budget already looking at holiday expenses and the initiation of orthodontia, my laptop, previously used for writing and other personal stuff, had to be recruited for the paycheck job.
Which translates to expensive software being loaded onto my laptop over the course of a week and subsequently my laptop being chained to the house instead of traipsing around town with me to various kid appointments and practices, where a lot of my writing used to happen.
The paycheck job took priority and the progress on the story dropped to a crawl. A handwritten crawl.
And the goal of finishing by the close of '13 diminished to a faint hope before it died altogether.
The second week of the year is staring me in the face and the climax of my scene is just starting. I'm thinking the story has around another 20k words until the last two - The End.
I'm hoping to finish it before school lets out for summer in May.
With any luck, the squirrels stay out of the wiring until then.
At least.
-L