July Writing Update—#ShutUpAndWrite, 2024

Reset—putting writing before marketing and promotion

Reset—putting writing before marketing and promotion.

During the last weeks, I have been realigning my habits with my main aim when I started this project—becoming a better writer and storyteller. I stopped looking at book sales and the number of reviews, social media apps are gone from my phone, and content creation is limited to weekly blog posts.

And, while I see benefits from focusing on habits over goals, SMART objectives are deeply ingrained in how I function as a human being, so I decided to follow a hybrid model—concentrating on habits that will get me to my goals, while enjoying the journey. I’ll delve deeper into this approach next week.

Talking about goals: ‘The House’ will be published this year, though I still don’t have a specific date. And … I’ve decided to write the outline for ‘The Spheres’—the final book in the trilogy—during this year’s NaNoRebel event in November.

Writing progress

In my last update, I had returned to my manuscript with some enthusiasm, and while diving straight into line edits worked well for scenes with minor changes, it soon proved inefficient for major rewrites and quickly became too time-consuming.

During the last two weeks I adjusted my revision ‘habits’ to working in layers. Each layer, or walk-through, focuses on one specific task, allowing me to progress through one chapter a day, rather than feeling stuck and discouraged.

The current revision layer focuses on bringing the draft in line with the new outline and assessing how much more work is needed for each scene. As of yesterday, I completed chapter 12, and today I’ll be tackling chapter 13.

That’s all for this update—it’s time to return to my draft!
I’ll check in again next week.

Happy writing!