Week of 12 February to 18 February
Maybe it’s doing these weekly updates that causes the months to feel as if they are flying by, because I yet again find myself tempted to remark upon how we are already down to just a week and a half remaining in February. Regardless, here we are with another weekly writing update, and I can at least say that I finished chapter six of Impressions. I’m working on chapter seven, now, which is going well so far. As I expected, the first major inciting incident will occur in this chapter, but I want to build up to it properly and believably, which means taking my time and making it appear a natural progression, and not something that happens because the plot calls for it.
I also spent some time on Ship in a Bottle this week, although you won’t find that reflected in any word counts. I’ve done three revisions so far, and foresee two more, which I will need to accomplish this upcoming week: one revision to iron out the story issues regarding the central character conflict and the role of the inciting object, and a final one to polish the wordsmithing and tighten the language and grammar. This week was spent thinking through my various options for improving the story based on the feedback I received, which has been as valuable an exercise as actually writing.
For the upcoming week, I intend to finish chapter seven and start on chapter eight, along with finishing Ship in a Bottle to a point of being ready for submission to the February Elegant Literature contest. Tuesday’s post is discussing the potential for artificial intelligence tools to write stories, which is somewhat of a symptom of how far in advance I write these posts – it was written months before ChatGPT and similar tools entered the common zeitgeist. Book reviews don’t suffer from quite the same problem, considering that I routinely review books written hundreds or even thousands of years ago…but this week’s kind of manages to, because I actually read Will Wight’s Dreadgod close to when it was released. I guess it’s a week for anachronistic posts? Even so, I hope you’ll give those a read, and check back here next week for another weekly writing update.
IGC Publishing 