My latest release, The Last Outpost, is available to buy now on Kindle.
Alex is the navigation officer aboard The Calico, a colonial supply ship. He’s far from home and can’t shake the feeling that he doesn’t belong. After dropping out of university on Mars, Alex joined the ESDC, hoping to find purpose among the stars. Instead he found himself on The Calico, in love with Eden, the XO, and desperate for a place to call his own.
Life in deep space isn’t what he imagined.
When The Calico arrives at a remote colony on Enceladus for what should be a routine supply drop, the crew discovers something far more troubling: there’s no one there.
Alex, Eden and a pilot called Jack descend to the icy colony and the mystery deepens. Where did the colonists go? What strange secrets lie beneath the surface of the moon?
Caught between his sense of longing, and a growing sense of danger, Alex must confront his most deeply held beliefs. Can he find his place in the vastness of the solar system, or is he doomed to wander, forever searching for something he can never reach?
This morning I published my first short story of the challenge: Sisterhood. I am just waiting for it to go through the Amazon approval process and then I will share the link here.
It took me 230 minutes to get the editing and publishing process done. The first draft was 8,855 words long, so that means it took me 1.5 seconds per word to publish it. I’m not sure that’s a particularly helpful statistic.
Tomorrow I will add it to the website and then, if there is time, move onto editing The Last Outpost.
The writing is still going well, although it feels a bit like I’m struggling to reach a turning point but can’t quite find my was there. It’s not near the end yet, but it’s moving forwards.
I’m enjoying the reading challenge. I have a pretty good collection of short stories I’m working my way through but I want to mix in some more modern essays and poems, so I found some to download. I think this element of the challenge is going to be very interesting.
And that’s the end of the weekend.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 26
Production
Words written today: 1,049
Words written total: 45,381
Plus / Minus target: +3,381
Currently writing: The Lottery
Post-Production
Minutes today: 22
Minutes total: 230
Plus / Minus target: +30
Currently publishing: Sisterhood
Reading
Short story: Dip in the Pool – Roald Dahl
Essay: My County Right or Left – George Orwell
Poem: I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon – Stephen Crane
I decided to go for it on the Bradbury Reading challenge. At the bottom of this post I’ve added a section so you can see what I’ve read. It seemed appropriate to go with a Bradbury short story for day one.
Although I have an Enlish degree, I’ve never really gotten into poetry for pleasure. I’m not sure if that’s going to change during the course of this challenge or not, but I think I get something from reading it.
The way I was taught to read a poem is to read it at least five times. Once in your head, followed by three times out loud, then a final time in your head again.
This is not all the reading I will do in a day. I am also listening to the audiobooks of the Expanse series, and reading Unruly by David Mitchell. I don’t expect to read them any less because of this. This reading is extra, the time it takes will come from time I was otherwise spending online.
The writing is still going well. My current story is going to be the longest one so far, but that’s not a problem. On the editing side, I am just working on the product description fo Sisterhood, and will hopefully have that up for order next week.
Most people probably wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I suffer from an all or nothing personality. No idea where I got it from, but it’s mine to deal with.
It comes out at times like when I try to improve my relationship with the internet. A sensible approach would be to reduce the amount of time I spend online, but I find myself jumping straight to not using the internet at all.
And it snowballs. I go from not using the internet at all to trying to reduce all my technology useage, until I’m ready to sell my phone and computer and go and live off the land.
This writing challenge is a good example of me trying to do the opposite of that. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I realised it.
The first writing challenge I set out to do was a million words in a year. Which I failed. To be fair, I got something like 800,000 so I failed well, but even if I’d managed it, I couldn’t have sustained it. This time things are different. 1,000 words a day is a goal I can hit pretty much every day. It’s not an impressive number, but it’s something I can do consistently. And that’s what I’m looking for.
The same is true for the planning (one story plan a day) and the editing I’m going to be starting on Friday. And now that I’ve realised it, I’m looking at other areas of my life where I can apply this simple goal of being a bit better.
I now have five stories planned, one of which I am currently writing, all of which I like. It might be hard to pick between them when the time comes. That’s not a complaint though, it’s what I wanted when I started this habit.
The idea process is straight forward. I have a little template in Obsidian that looks like this:
IDEA:
A CHARACTER:
THE CHARACTER WANTS SOMETHING:
BUT SOMETHING PREVENTS THEM FROM GETTING WHAT THEY WANT EASILY:
SO THEY STRUGGLE AGAINST THE FORCE:
AND EITHER SUCCEED OR FAIL:
SETUP:
MOVE INTO ACTION:
THE PROMISE IN THE PREMISE:
SHIT GETS REAL:
FINALE:
I start with a vague description and then I work through each step. The last part (SETUP to FINALE) is the actual plan. Usually I go through it in order, but this morning the ending was the clearest image in my mind, so I started there.
It usually takes ten minutes to fill it in, but that’s ten minutes well spent if I avoid floundering around when writing the first draft. And I don’t know, although I suspect, the editing will be quicker as well. So all in all, it seems like time well spent.
