Writing accomplishments: Well, I went to the monthly creative meet-up of the Yolo County NaNoWriMo group — there were just two of us for nearly three hours and then a third person showed up at the end. That’s not unexpected since UC Davis just finished for the year and various other people who normally show up are away traveling. Anyhow, I didn’t get much done because we were talking. But a fair amount of the talking was related to writing. And I did come up with a couple of character names for my July project. (Character names can be a problem — if I am writing and a new character is introduced I can be completely derailed if I have to come up with a name.)

This week I am going to concentrate on making the necessary changes to ALL GREMLINS (C1) in preparation for sending out the query (which I also worked on a bit today). I am making progress!

Writing accomplishments: worked on the query for ALL GREMLINS (C1) — I’m really tempted to leave this sentence in: “I am a former veterinarian who can’t write this query to save her damn life.” but I won’t. Also worked on the outline for the episodic fantasy with magic and a dragon that will be my July project.

While I was in my usual Friday evening spot at the coffeehouse/hipster bar, one of my vet school classmates came in to have dinner with his family. And five minutes later he got a phone call and had to leave to go take care of a dog that had been hit by a car, and I thought, yep, that’s what it was like.

Writing accomplishments: Finished the most recent round of edits and uploaded ALL ROCS (C2) to the Word Forge critique group. Now I can forget about it for a month.

July is another Camp NaNoWriMo month so I may take a couple of days now to develop an outline before I dive back into working on edits to ALL GREMLINS (C1) and its query letter.

Related to editing, I liked doing a final check on my Kindle (and wow, did I catch quite a few typos that way), but bringing up the notes I’d made afterward turned out to be kind of a pain. When I made the notes I would highlight a section and then add a note. When I went through them all at the end I had to bring up the menu->go to->notes->touch the specific note. That would take me to the place in the text. Then I had to touch the note number so it would bring up the note itself. Then I had to delete both the note and the highlighting, and after all that I had to start the whole thing over again with bringing up the menu. I have to imagine there’s a better way — maybe there’s some way to bring up all the notes on the website or something.

Writing accomplishments: Doing a final read-through of ALL ROCS (C2) on my Kindle before I hand it off to the Word Forge critique group.

The good: Reading it on my Kindle somehow makes it seem like a Real Book™. (You know what I mean.) That’s exciting.

The bad: I realized today that despite the fact that the detached garage in the story was previously converted to living space (an important plot point), in one chapter one of the characters goes out to the attached garage… which doesn’t exist. The number of times I’ve read through this manuscript is probably in the high double digits if not in the triple digits. This is the first time I’ve noticed this problem. What else am I not seeing?

Writing accomplishments: Submitted the first two chapters of ALL BASILISKS (C3) to YWC. (I realized the deadline isn’t until next week, but it was ready so I put it out there.) Read through the other two entries for critique that are already in the folder. Fixed some formatting issues and set up the title page for ALL ROCS (C2), then compiled the whole thing and sent it to my Kindle so I can do a final read-through before submitting it to the WF critique group. Soon I won’t have anything to use to avoid the query letter…

And for fun, replied to this tweet:

Greyson and Lucy serenade their guest 🙂 https://t.co/HxdKWKRimy pic.twitter.com/jq5sv0Hjww

— Cherie Priest (@cmpriest) June 11, 2018

with this:

There’s a Rottie on my street (ba-DUH-duh-DA)
He just pees then he poos (ba-DUH-duh-DA)
Greyson won’t let me get him (ba-DUH-duh-DA)
I got them fence diggin’ blues (ba-DUH-da-da-DUH)

— TM Baumgartner (@tm_baumgartner) June 11, 2018

Writing accomplishments: Finished addressing the notes on ALL ROCS (C2) — YAY! I still need to make another pass through the entire manuscript to make sure I didn’t mess something up, but I should have no problem getting it out to the critique group by the Thursday deadline (although now the terror begins again… what if it totally sucks?). Gave C3 a tentative title (ALL BASILISKS WISE AND WONDERFUL), cleaned up the first two chapters, then argued with Scrivener a while about what the compiled version would look like.

One of the things that was confusing me this evening with the compile options is that I was getting completely different behavior depending on whether I selected chapters 1 & 2 in the binder and told it to just compile the selected sections, or if I selected “manuscript” and just clicked the checkboxes for the first two chapters. Two take-aways (I think):

• Selecting “manuscript” means there is another level of folders around everything. That probably doesn’t matter for many books, but the way I set up the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter means that it does matter for me.
• Option-click unselects everything so you don’t have to manually deselect every other scene in the manuscript when just compiling the first two chapters.

Writing accomplishments: Addressed seven of the fourteen remaining notes on ALL ROCS (C2). I should be able to finish them tomorrow and then make another quick pass through the whole thing on Sunday to make sure nothing has gotten messed up during the edits. I still have over half a pot of tea left, so I’ll work on cleaning up the first chapter of C3 (also due this weekend) before I leave.

The view behind me at the moment:

I love those doors…