General Status Update
Book 4 continues to kick my butt. By my tracking, I haven’t written new words on it since February 8th. I have been editing and brainstorming, but the fact that new words haven’t been produced in over a month really makes it feel like this sucker has stalled. I got so listless that I broke out a favorite writing craft book this past week and have just been gorging myself on that and it seems to have worked. I think I figured out what my middle was missing and how that will tighten the novel and propel me into the third act. I need to edit the middle to layer in the missing awesome sauce, but after that (one or two more weeks) I’m confident I’ll be drafting again.
My reading as slowed down, but I think that’s just because I shifted to reading nonfiction and my current book Heaven by Randy Alcorn is a bit of a behemoth of a book. It’s good and pretty interesting, but I find it repetitive which makes it hard to get through at times. I’m more of an executive summary kind of guy, tell me what I need to know, in the optimal number of words, no more, no less. So repetition tends to grate on me, both written form and verbal.
My watching of Breaking Bad on the other hand has accelerated rather rapidly. My wife and I were watching one show a week together starting last fall as a form of a stay-in date night on a week day. At that rate it was taking a loooong time to get through it, with plenty of weeks missed due to travel schedules. Eventually, my wife declared she couldn’t take the tension in the show anymore and I was free to watch at will. So now I actually look forward to working out every morning as I get to watch an episode a day. At that rate I think I have about another month before I need to find something else to watch on the treadmill.