I guess I did a little on a lot of things, but not much on any one thing. It’s like when you clean your house and you take dirty clothes from one room to the next to discover there’s something there that has to be cleaned before you can actually do the laundry…

This was a wakeup week that I need to plan. I’d love to say that I did tons of writing, but I didn’t. I got bogged down with too many possibilities and no clear direction. Analysis paralysis. I am still waiting to hear back from my editor, and it is nerve-racking. So I thought I’d try to outline the series. I have a spreadsheet that I should be able to put things into, but the spreadsheet doesn’t feel right. I think I want to put the data into an outline, in Scrivner, but I haven’t done that yet. To be honest, it’s rather daunting. So, I thought I’d start on the short story, as my friend Moon suggested I enter the Writers of the Future contest. That said, I haven’t written many short stories. So I began to look up, and study, how to write short stories. 

Then I began to separate short stories. They both begin with the same words “I live in the black world. It’s how I pay my rent.“ They are two very different stories, though. In one of them, I got about halfway done and realized I should’ve outlined it first. Why do I keep learning that lesson? (Or rather not learning it?)

So, tonight, I’m stepping back and going to do the daunting thing. I’m going to take all my series notes (from about six or seven different places) and put them into an outline in Scrivener. Then, I will see what else needs to go in that outline. If I don’t complete that tonight, it will remain my focus, at least until I get my edits back. Whoo! At least now I have a plan.