Writing Progress Review #10

Content warning: occasional profanity. For some reason we always seem to open our chats with a discussion of sports and weather. Maybe I should call this the "water cooler chat" portion. This time it has something to do with a sport involving an oblong ball of some sort, a relatively severe winter with yet more snow in the forecast, and Michael's upcoming escape to Italy, where winter is not so much. The mention of degrees in the weather discussion sidetracks us into a discussion of units of measure and which audiences to service, the archaic US, the rest of the world, or both. There's also a relatively serious diversion into writing injuries, except this time it's the physical injuries, not just the mental ones. Then we get to progress. On my side I express surprise at how slowly my editing is going and we digress into how we deal with editing advice and doing a mid-story recap to help a reader keep track of the plot. Next Michael reports with some big news and makes a valiant attempt to segue to this episode's question and wrap things up but I mess that up by complaining about the lack of granularity in reader surveys (full text here: https://alanlangford.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/186823234?referrer=peanut_butter). Now deep into digressions, we wind up talking about author loyalty and whether a book that doesn't work for us puts us off an author or not. We cycle back to editing and talk about differences in the way different programs come up with word counts. Back on track, we talk about whether how we feel about setting one project aside to work on another one. This leads into talk about actually finishing a project, and what "finished" actually means, and now that authors are now the drivers of their own marketing, how even when the writing is done, the work for that book isn't finished. Coming to a close we set the question for next week, before one last question about the distribution of the notes we make for the next draft. 0:00 Water Cooler Chat 5:29 Progress, digressing into structure/editing 17:00 Michael's update 21:30 Reader surveys 27:55 Tools & Word Counts 31:40 Hook: writing on the road 39:40 More editing