Writing Progress Review #13

Content warning: occasional profanity. This episode starts with us laughing about saying "on the air" with our tiny number of viewers (hi there, viewers, we appreciate you). We also had a little hiccup getting started because Michael was misled about when we start thanks to an AI assistant. He claims that he's talking more with his hands thanks to being in Italy and has found a book that describes what each of the gestures means. My progress report: my read-through/edit is complete, I talk about being blocked by my neurodivergence and distracting myself with other things. This leads into a long discussion of coping with ADD, ADHD, and Autism, and that takes us into how we manage our to-do lists. Michael reports on his editing process, he's submitted a story to a contest, and then he discovers that the "writerpalooza" we talked about last episode is really a "write-a-thon," which now sounds more like a NaNoWriMo sort of thing. He has the beginning of a story ready for the event. This sort of writing to a target takes into talking about group writing sprints. I find them unrewarding, Michael complains that they all happen in the evening, but he's a morning writer. He talks about how he's most creative in the morning, when he has more free flowing ideas. It's interesting that we both like writing when it's dark. Me late at night, him early in the morning. I cycle the conversation back to neurodivergence as I ask Michael if he ever gets into a hyper-focus mode. He talks about how long he can focus on writing and how he leaves a note at the end of a session so he can pick up the thread in the next session. I relate I can hyper-focus on software development and wish I could do the same with writing. This leads into the work I put into my manuscript analysis tool to measure "clumpiness." Moving on to our goals for the next two weeks, I give a long answer that amounts to "write the frigging ending," while Michael talks about editing his book, how many passes he's made through it, and his progress in getting the word count down. We discuss word count expectations in his genre. He has two goals: finish edits by end of April, getting it ready to re-pitch or self-publish, then to get a first draft of another story during April. Then we talk about last week's hook: the things we can't we live without while writing. Links to all the places I can be found online: https://alanlangford.com/places