June 6: Progress Report

Ahh, the camper: my home away from home.

I'm back to the daily grind after having Thursday through Tuesday away from the day job. While I didn't get the garden planted like I wanted, I did buy my plants and spend time with the family and get a few other things done. It was a wonderful stretch of time off.

Best of all, my husband kept me motivated, mostly by calling a halt to my cleaning projects by 9:00 PM at the latest, and sending me out to write.

Last night was kind of scary, since I forgot my flashlight, the camper is a little bit of a jaunt across the very, very dark barnyard, and less than a mile or so away, I heard coyotes howling. It's too bad my romance is a contemporary one and not a historical western, because their "mood music" would have been perfect for background noise. As it was, though, it just gave me the creeps.

My sunset view.

After reading some discussion on the MMRWA list today, I've signed up for a 30 day trial of the writing software program, Scrivener. I used to use yWriter, which was great (and free!), but something about the interface didn't speak enough to my creative side for novel writing. Worked wonderfully for keeping all of my freelance articles in order, though! After I play around with Scrivener a little more, I'll post a review on it in case anyone else is interested in what looks to be a nifty organizing tool.

I've spent a good part of the afternoon copying and pasting my current 32K words of Lucky in Love into Scrivener, which, as any good procrastinator knows, is just another excuse to not actually write. But despite my delays, I'm plugging along just fine on my book and have cranked out another 35 pages since Memorial Day.

My goal was to do 100 pages between the last MMRWA meeting and the next, which is on June 15, so that leaves me with 45 pages to go before next Saturday. I'm currently averaging 4.3 pages a night (for real -  I used a calculator!). So, to make my goal, I'll have to ramp it up to about six pages a night, since I'm going to be at a bonfire on Saturday night without my laptop.

I'm feeling positive, though!