The image for today brought to you by the lavender essential oil in the diffuser on my kitchen table. It smells great.
One of the things I told myself last month was that I was going to ensure I spent the morning focusing on writing ONLY - the afternoon would be for all the other miscellaneous administrative tasks that come with being an author.
I, of course, promptly did not follow my own goal this morning. I want to say I have a good reason. Unfortunately, I woke up to find that the limited edition Kickstarter edition of the books I received back in August arrived to me via Fedex, who have been having issues charging import fees erroneously on books printed by by printer in the UK.
To avoid this, I have been ordering smaller batches to come under the weight limit so they will be shipped by The Delivery Group/USPS. Not entirely sure why these were shipped by Fedex, but they are asking $64 for import fees which is...steep. I knew I wasn't going to be able to focus on writing unless I looked into this a little bit, so this ended up disrupting my morning more than I intended.
I'm telling myself tomorrow I will get back on track! That is all any of us can ever do.
FOCUS: Preparing some exciting things for what comes next after The Wards Will Fall is published next year. Today I sent off some back cover copy to my agent, and then focused on organizing my thoughts around Book 2 and Book 3 in this series (yes, there will be multiple books that follow Maxwell and [redacted]!). I got about 100 more words of organizational notes done, which isn't a lot, but that's primarily because I spent most of the time thinking about HOW I wanted to approach book 2 and book 3. And in what order made the most sense for these books.
I bounced a few ideas of my crit partner friend, which confirmed for me the plans I have for book 2 that I was leaning towards make the most sense. So I have a better idea of what the plot for this book looks like, as well as the confidence that I'm on the right path with it.
PROCESS & SUCH: I'm continuing to keep track of my thoughts and book notes in Obsidian, which is a fantastic tool to stay organized.
I took a quick screenshot to demonstrate what I mean here about being organized. I used to keep notes in Scrivener, but found the notes function rather clunky and overwhelming since I tend to feel scattered. This is much more neat and has an excellent tagging and search function, which makes it much easier to find the information I need.
It was a bit of a painful process to learn and setup, since you basically have to build templates from the ground up, but I really love it.
At any rate, I noodled more in Obsidian and figured out where I'm going with the story today. I didn't do any sprints, and I really should have. I think this would have helped me to stay on track.
WATCHING: If you guessed Psych reruns, you would be CORRECT. Still chugging along with this show.
LISTENING: Listened to more of my TWWF writing playlist this morning, which always gets me in the right mood to think about this book and these characters.
READING: Finished up Hellbound by Stephanie Binx today (Bookshop, Amazon, Kobo)!!! A good read, and I still recommend it if you like contemporary fantasy with a cosmic horror/shadow daddy romance angle. Trying to decide what to read next, but I'm thinking it's going to be Our Crimson Cage by Ladz.
LINK: This quote by Annie Dillard is on my mind today about writing - "give it, give it all, give it now".
UP NEXT: My goal is to get at least a few chapters of Book 2, a synopsis and pitch for the next few books completed by the end of the week next week. This is a tall order, so tomorrow I will be jumping straight into things and hopefully will not get distracted by other annoying administrative tasks requiring my attention.