February wrap-up

I meant to write more blog posts about my endeavours in January, but, well, now it’s March.

First, of course, is writing. I didn’t make a lot of progress with the third Sisters of Chaos book in January, as I spent much of the month rereading my draft from last year and making notes on how to begin my edits. I also cut fully a third of last year’s writing, 30,000 words, from the draft. By the end of the month, I had just finished rewriting the opening scene of the book.

By the end of February, I rewrote the next three scenes from that character’s POV and then reviewed them again. Despite the trouble the same strategy left me with the second book, I’ve decided to focus on one character’s scenes at a time for the time being. (And really, the problems with doing it this way with the second book mainly equated to fitting all the scenes together, and I’m going to have some reshuffling to do with this book anyway.) While I have plenty of editing to do on following scenes, I at least don’t have to completely rewrite these next ones.

I still wish I had made more progress in February, though I have been fighting seasonal affective disorder in the first part of this year, which has affected my motivation for writing. It’s also had me throwing myself into media escapes—namely, reading the Wings of Fire books and continuing to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Of the former, I’ve read the first eight books, and of the latter, after more than forty hours of game play, I’m not halfway through yet. Both have proven incredibly addicting, so after deleting my latest mobile time-waster game, I tend to spend free time when I’m not feeling writing or don’t want to get completely lost in a book or game watching YouTube videos.

I want to spend more time working on my book, however. I know it needs a fair bit of work still, but I don’t want this first round of edits to take as long as writing 120,000 words did.

As for updating this blog more often… well, we’ll see.