Writing day
I realized a while back that, though I've been enjoying my monthly workshop more than ever, and I like the people in it, it wasn't actually getting me to write.
Back in March or so, I tried an experiment: skipped a workshop meeting in order to write. Knowing that I was missing a workshop meeting made me actually focus on writing, rather than putting it off or doing other things. And for a while after that, I was meeting with a friend one evening a week and writing.
But then things fell apart in April or so, with the advent of Loud Car guy and busyness and various other excuses, and I once again got out of the habit of writing regularly.
So last month I announced to the workshop that I'm going on hiatus from workshop. I'm going to spend workshop days writing. I don't know if it'll work, but very little else seems to get me to write, and once a month is better than nothing. A first step, anyway.
Today was a workshop day, and thus, for me, a writing day. I finished my long-delayed revisions on the story I took to workshop last month (which I only finally wrote, after months of planning to do so, because I knew it was going to be my last workshop meeting for a while), and got it all ready to print and send out, which I'll be doing shortly.
Then I settled in to work on the collaboration with Mary Anne, which has been awaiting my attention for a month now; I haven't known where to go with it, so I've been ignoring it. I wrote some notes, then talked with Mary Anne about various details we'd discussed last month that I'd neglected to write down. Then I spent much of the afternoon fleshing out backstory in my notes, coming up with cultural and religious details, reading up on relevant real-world history, figuring out character arc, thinking about overall plot. Finally wrote a scene and sent it back to her.
Total word count for actual fiction, for both stories, was only about 800 words. But made a lot of progress on two different stories, one of which is now as ready to send out as it'll ever be, and put in several solid hours of useful work. With a little time out now and then.
Of course, I'll need to do a lot more writing over the next week; the deadline for that collaboration is coming up quick. But I have a much better idea of where the story is headed now, so it should go quicker.
In other news, today's my last day of freedom; my sabbatical is over, and tomorrow morning I go back to work. I have no idea where all that time went.