So That Was July

Whenever I make ambitious plans for my life, I find that they almost always collapse under the weight of my expectation and reality. And that'exactly what happened in July. I had ambitious plans and just couldn't exactly hit the marks I wanted to hit. I still did okay, but not as well as I'd wished. But I'm actually okay with it and that's as important as part of the process as doing the writing sometimes.

I didn't blog as much as I'd liked. Summer school has kept me busier than I thought as I work at making sure the kids have enough work to do...not that they are doing it, but I want to make sure there isn't idle time beyond when they decide they aren't doing the work. It's kind of a wasted expenditure of energy but a necessary one. It's mildly soul crushing because most of these kids just don't care but are showing up every day to just hang out in my room, watch videos and shoot the shit. And comically I think most of them think they are passing....but I promised that I wasn't going to spend a lot of space talking about my job on this blog so I won't. I still blogged more than I have at other times. I blogged more than I have since I first came over to Blogger from LiveJournal.

I've got some ideas for blogs I want to write, including one on how the quality of the Vacation movies are entirely dependent on the quality of the Audrey and Rusty.

Life has been busy, as it usually is. Between what I'll call "fire business" to general tiredness from school, I've found myself back into a cycle of doing mindless stuff when I've gone home when I'm not busy with actual things to do like doctor's appointments, stuff with the kids and other errands that need to be done. It always disappoints me that I fall into this cycle but I have to learn to stop beating myself up over this. I'm learning but it's hard.

My Harry Potter read is moving along, slower than I want. I'm on Prisoner of Azkaban and I have some thoughts about how it might've been the one that "grew the beard" for the HP series. I'm going to add that to the blog idea list as well, plus an explanation of that specific trope. I'm itching for some big book epic fantasy and plan on using the later Potter books as a primer for that.

Finished 11 books for the month including a fun book about Godzilla and a few YA books that really surprised me. I'm listening to The Well's End by Seth Fishman (a literary agent that I would love to work with) in the car (it's a little tropey but really, really good) and still plodding through Alexander Hamilton. I'm well on my way to finishing 120 books for the year.

As for the reason you all came here, the writing. I only got about 10,000 words, which is way below what I was hoping for. However, I'm very happy with those words. This story is really something and it's moving along nicely. The issue I'm having with it is that I've been pantsing it, so the narrative can me a little muddled and I'm letting things surprise me as I find them in the writing. I've been tempted to do what I call half-drafting it. What that means in terms of me is stopping the draft where it is and starting over, cleaning up what I already wrote to get the ending right. I call it halving because I create a new file and give it a .5 designation. That means this would be saved as Picture1.5. I'm not sure if I'm there yet, but I know there's things I want to add to the story from where I am now, but part of me wants to just get through it and then fix it later. I will let you all know. The word count stands at just north of 45k. I'd like to make a run at finishing it this month and that's very doable.

My other works kind of fizzled. I did some stuff on the next epic fantasy I want to write and messed around with my Instagram fiction idea a little, but I'm not locked into it yet.

I'm not making plans for August. Maybe that'll help me actually do all the things that I want to do.