ROW80 Update - March 7

Here is my A Round of Words in 80 Days update:
(Find a list of today's other ROW80 updates here.)

Sunday Day 63 - 24 minutes. But they were a really GOOD 24 minutes. Very productive. I had dim sum, and went to see The Lorax today, as well as worked a little more on some future stories for the Daring Adventure Stories blog. I also did some off-the-clock work on some fiction ideas.

But the big time sink right now will be that it's Derringer Award voting time! For members of The Short Mystery Fiction society, March is the month to read through the finalists in each category and vote. I like to read them all the same way, out of fairness, and so I convert them to text and put the finalists in each category into a single doc and stick it on my Kindle. Converting differently formatted rtf files can be a pain.

However, I discovered a very cool shortcut in prepping ebook files -- a way to keep italics and such when you use the "nuclear option" of putting the text through a text editor to strip the junk out of it. I will probably do a post on that sometime soon. (Sometimes I really like Word, in spite of itself.)

Monday Day 64 - 21 minutes. Not such a productive session, but my mind was elsewhere. I had stuff to deal with on Monday.

I'm sort of between stools right now, and I'm already thinking ahead to the next Round on RWO80. I think I'll go back to my older strategy next month. I might even dial back further on the goals -- but I feel like I'm positioning myself for a very productive time. These little short bursts of work are way more productive (generally) than before. I think I may be ready to move to another level and harness those.

I find it's very very good to put my emphasis on prep work... but I was right in the first place about not counting it. It's too nebulous to make a dare goal. I need to go back to just nose-in-book as counting for the goal.

But as I said, that nose-in-book time is becoming much more fruitful. And much more fun. It's really helping the enthusiasm. It seems particularly suited for Mick and Casey stories, which are relatively simple. It's easy to pile in complications with their stories without throwing myself too far off track. With Starling and Marquette? I'm not so sure. I think I'll get there, but I also might find I just have to do more prep work.

Tuesday Day 65 - 45 minutes. Back to outlining. I had a sudden flash of realization on the opening for The Man Who Stepped Up. I was lacking an opening. I had a murder plot, not a story. And I was thinking about another story idea -- just a scene starter idea without a plot -- and I realized it would really really really suit the story arc. That is, the sequence I had in mind would be the perfect next thing to happen after the end of the previous book. At first it didn't seem to fit with the existing idea, and I thought I'd have to come up with a whole new plot, title and cover....

But then I realized it not only fit, but it made a really good way to rev up the plot I had.

More Pulp Ficiton

Daring Adventure Stories will have a new story up on Monday. I'll do an announcement post here when it goes live.

I am currently debating whether to post stories every Monday, or just twice a month. (Some of the original pulp magazines I'm getting these stories from had the headline "Twice-A-Month" on their masthead.) I seem to be doing well with once a week, but The Popular Magazine did not have illustrations. If I post less often, I might have time to work up some dingbats or something to do a little illustrating myself.

On the other hand, I could just not post stories from The Popular Magazine very often....

See you in the funny papers.