Update Link: Signs of Life – Part 11

Another long update from me.

P 1 & 2 – Checking in with me and plans to resolve fatigue
P 3 & 4 – CG Facelift.
P 5-End – Mad World update

I was telling my sister about how tired I’ve been lately and she reminded me that when the school year ended, I stopped drinking coffee in the morning because I wanted to eliminate my sugary sweet creamer from my diet. I adore coffee, but I’m very aware of just how much sugar I eat. I looked up the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal, and, uh, there’s some correlation there. I’m going to attempt to put it back into my morning routine but I’m experimenting with black coffee. I’m starting with it iced because that’s how I cut out sugar in my tea about ten years ago.

I’m going to see how that works this week, plus I’ll get blood work to check my sugars. Diabetes runs on both sides of my family, and a few years ago I was pre-diabetic. I worked hard to get my levels back to normal. With the pandemic, like everyone else, my standards for what I was eating fell apart. I tend to stress eat and candy is one of my big things.

In other news, I’ve been working on the Facelift again. If you’re following the Alternate History page, you’ll see that 2003 is finally starting to be filled out. I’m also removing the links to stories that have been moved from the Ficlet and Short Story pages. I want you to be able to find all of my stories on one page, and then if you want to sort for length, you can use the By Length page I created a few years ago.  2003 is a huge category of stories because I was writing a lot of episode tags and short stories at that point. 2004 & 2006 are close runners-up.

For each story, I’m rewriting the Timeline & Inspiration sections so it’s easier to to know exactly when a story was set. A lot of those original Timeline write ups were very vague because I hadn’t updated them since I wrote the story. For example, one of the stories simply says this: This takes place after Elizabeth walks away from Carly. Very clear, right? LOL.

I’m hard at work on Mad World. I’ve completed Chapters 76-79, but I’ve also been going through last summer’s draft and pulling out any scenes that I can use in full with light edits or chunks. This has helped to push the word count to 43k, though the completed chapter count is low. I’m also going to experiment today with just writing a few storylines. I’m going to play with the Liason storyline in Act 1, and just write those scenes, and then go back to write Sonny/Carly — which takes care of big chunks of those chapters. Then I’ll fill in the spots.

I’m trying this out for a few reasons —

• Book 4 is probably the mostly densely plotted of the four books. I have a lot of story to get to and a lot of characters rolling around.
• Going chapter by chapter often means I write a really pivotal scene for Liason, but then I don’t revisit that beat for six or seven more scenes. That’s fine when you’re reading it because it gives you a break in the tension and emotion but when writing it, I think the scenes flow better when I’m more connected to those things.
• I usually write one chapter a day, but it’s been a struggle to do that lately because I’ve been feeling so tired. When I don’t complete a full chapter, it feels like I’m behind even though I know I’m not. I’m going to concentrate on word count rather than chapter count and hope that relievers some of the anxiety.

Honestly — if that process works, I could write five chapters in maybe four days. I’ll check in on Tuesday & Wednesday to let you know how that process is going. See you on Tuesday!

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