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Quarter 2 Update

Seattle, from Elliot Bay Trail
Seattle, from Elliot Bay Trail. 

April: Drafted first 1/4 of Dandelions V3.0. Attended another craft book club with the writing group, this time reading "Story Genius." While I've read it before (while drafting V1.0 of Dandelions, actually), this time something clicked. AND I made a friend! Then I got the non-COVID non-Flu cold from hell, which knocked me out for about 3 weeks. 

May: Had an existential crisis over whether Dandelions had a plot. Caved and bought Plottr, and spent 2 weeks re-plotting using a combination of Story Genius and Plottr. Fell in love with Plottr (seriously--I created an adapted Story Genius-inspired template for each scene outline, and then exported the whole thing to scrivener. Then I shifted my half-draft into the new template and everything is so clean and organized!). In the second half of May I revised the first half of Dandelions to fit the new outline. 

June: Drafted the second half of Dandelions. Beta read 3 fulls, totaling 254,000 words. For the second half of the month I traveled: we went to Chicago to spend a couple days with the in-laws, see Fall Out Boy, and enjoy a day by the lake; then I spent 4 days in Seattle for a work conference. Before the conference started I managed to locate Seattle's super cool central library and write for about an hour from the main floor. Once the conference began I was too busy to write, but I had a great time getting to know some distant coworkers and hearing about the latest wave of health services research. After the conference I took a train to Portland and spent some time with a dear friend and her two ridiculous dogs. Again, very little writing occurred, but I loved it. 

Portland Rose Garden
Portland Rose Garden

Up next: I'm 3 scenes away from finishing this draft of Dandelions. I'm hoping that if I buckle down I can complete this by July 4th. Then ideally I'll spend 2 weeks doing a line edit and cleaning up some small inconsistencies before sending this off for betas before a family vacation to Wisconsin. 

After that I'll likely take a week or so off from writing, and then either dig into a short or two or try my hand at zero drafting something new. 

2023 Goals: 

  1. Begin querying The Seaming -- Complete in Q1. 
  2. Write, polish, and submit 6 short stories -- In progress, kind of. I wrote one short in Q1 and none since. I might drop this goal depending on how things progress with whatever comes after Dandelions. 
  3. Draft one zero-draft -- Not started. Dandelions has been in the works for so long that I can't consider any portion of drafting it to be a zero draft. 
  4. Be a better participant in my writing communities -- In progress. During Q2 I read 254,000 words of my friends' writing, for a mid-year total of 422,000 words (again not counting critique group pieces).
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