This week was a surprise because I didn’t think I did much but I almost doubled my writing goal. This is likely because I don’t leave the house anymore and stay up late and still get up fairly early. I also started a new story and so I’ve been running away with that whilst trying to convince myself to do my uni work and focus writing work.

For uni work, I have to write a critique for one of my group members and prepare for a meeting on Monday with my project group. For my other class, I have no idea what I’m doing because they currently have to shift all of the assessment tasks as they relied on being in class. The current work we’re doing in the project is putting together a week of workshops around Spoken Word designed for putting together a small performance with high school students in senior years. The critiques for my other class are Voice critiques that are fairly straight forward and we will be graded on them by our peers rather than our tutor.

All learning is going online now and I’m fortunate that what I am studying can more or less smoothly be carried over to online via email, video call, Google doc sharing, Facebook etc. and so I’m lucking in that regard compared to people who have practical classes they needed to attend.

Whilst I haven’t been as productive with my uni work as I have my writing, I have at least been reading a lot more. I finished Pride and Prejudice (my posts about that can be found a few days back) and am continuing on with The Secret River and A Song for the Dying. I’m already halfway through The Secret River, so I will probably finish that next.

Currently, my targets for the week are at:

• 18,606/ 10,000 for “Personal Writing”
• 4,985/ 5,000 for “Professional Writing”

I’m still focused on finishing The Doll and just occasionally writing in The Demon’s Secretary. The new piece I’ve just started is currently called The Runaways, but I imagine I will be changing that at some point. I’m thinking that I might use this as an April Focus Project but haven’t quite decided yet. The timing would be good and I don’t expect it to be large but I also haven’t finished The Doll or properly started the editing process with TAS.

I started thinking about writing The Runaways when I was watching Naruto: Shippuden and intend it to really follow a simple plotline, literally just a tale of running away. I don’t think it will be a small story, however, as I know how excitable I can get, but I don’t intend to add anything more to it, meaning that it shouldn’t get too out of hand. I’ll post more on this probably in the next writing reflection. I used the opening of it as my writing prompt for ‘Meet’ on Saturday. It starts in a forest and is going to end somewhere in another forest.

I’ve had to move my workspace downstairs because my partner will be training a new employee via video call and I will also need to do my own video calls so I (with my ‘plebian laptop’) am the one that has shuffled out. And I’m loving it. I like my view of the window but I also like being in a dark room when no glare affects my glasses and screen and I can lock the door and do whatever it is I damn well please… which so far has been playing Legally Blonde, Study With Me videos and Hannibal in the background as I type hope it starts raining outside again. I didn’t realise how much I missed my own space until I came down here. There’s also a huge corkboard screwed into the wall behind the desk and so I’m excited to start procrastinating by planning out things on it.

I am also planning to try out Scrivener and see how that goes. They offer a 30 day free trial and so I’ll either love it so much I’ll tell you next week or I’ll wait until the trial is up to discuss how I felt about it. I’m looking for something that will help me tidy up the way I keep my writing notes and make it easier for me to access them. I already have Evernote, but the desktop version isn’t as nice as I was hoping and I’m looking for something with a bit more.

Stay Happy and Healthy!

That’s my Writing Reflection for the week starting the 23rd March 2020.