Challenge Update - Progress If You Squint

The past week made me feel like a failure, because Life got in my way.

Until I realized that, even if I can't do 5000 words a day unless I actually have the day to myself, I have been doing 2000 words a day, even with Life dancing a rumba on my head. (No, wait, that was the cat dancing on my head.  Life was trying to dance with me, and kept going for the dip when I wasn't prepared...)

The Xtreme Outlning experiment has indeed made that 2k level of writing an easy, low-key task -- something it has never been before.  Two thousand words used to be something I had to work at.  Now it isn't.

It's actually easy enough that I mainly have to worry about forgetting, because it leaves time and energy for other things.  And you know how I am about Other Things. 

I don't think, however, that I'm going to get the book quite done this month. All the same, it seems like a really fruitful experiment. I'll sum up more of what I learned end of next week.

Audio Blog Post Coming Up!

A part of my problem with the current project -- doing the romantic suspense stories under a pen name -- is that it is no longer shiny.  I am still highly motivated on this book, but I don't know if the motivation will last for three books in one go.  Audio is calling to me again.  Other series are also calling.  (Also, the covers for the romantic suspense books are calling, even if I don't feel like writing them all right now.)

Since I've been seriously neglecting my second podcast -- the one associated with this blog -- and I had a short, interesting post waiting to be published, so I decided to record it. this morning.  It went swimmingly, editing and all.  (Well, it was only 3-4 minutes.)  The sound quality is much improved over the previous episodes, so I had to redo the opening and closing as well.

(Have I mentioned that I love my Shure SM58 microphone?  I recorded this while the computer was running and the cat was snoring withing 3 feet of where I was working.)

I'll be posting that later tonight (as a text post, as well as audio).

As a teaser I will post a little music video of a song that refers to the same Zen principle that my post will refer to.  Only my post should be more clear as to what I'm talking about.  (Which is readers just read a story, then when you learn to write, you lose your ability to enjoy reading... then when you master your skills, you enjoy reading again. i.e. First there is a story, then there is no story, then there is....)

This is a song by Donovan, a very hippy sort of singer from the sixties, who I grew up with.


See you in the funny papers.