No, not quitting the blog. I mean that more as a summary. Also another kind of closing, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
ROW80 is officially on hiatus this week, and will start up again tomorrow, Monday the 6th. I didn’t get near what I wanted on my goals, mostly due to “life happenings.” One of those was my husband breaking his arm, but my continued working on fatigue and my own productivity was in there as well. When life happens, you can’t beat yourself up over it, just dust yourself off, get up, and move on. Easy to say, not always so easy to do. One thing I learned was that even opening the file and saying, “just write 100 words” always adds up to much more than I expect, so that’s a tool I plan to use again when life happens.
The other happening was that DH and I bought another apartment building, and had our closing last week. That brings us up to three buildings. Managing them is DH’s job. Fortunately, much of that is talking on the phone, something that doesn’t require the use to two arms. This building is right next door to the first one we bought and have owned for over ten years, and we bought it from the real estate agents who handled the sale of the other two, and the price was right so it was a no-brainer. Where it became a life-happens event was that we somehow got saddled with a loan officer who was totally incompetent and dragged the process out much longer than it should have been, and caused me to keep having to dig up additional paperwork (sometimes the same thing more than once), when it should have been once and done. But it’s over now, so all is good. We went over there one evening and met the two tenants who’d lived there a while, both really nice people who seemed like the good kind you want–i.e., take care of the place and pay on time.
What I read this week: Kill Game, the novel in Smith’s Monthly #6. This is a cozy mystery, and I’m not quite done with it, but enjoying it very much! There is a nice bit of romance in it, common for cozy mysteries, and I like how this one is very genuine, not forced, and works perfectly with the characters and the story. I also like that the main characters are in their 50s and 60s–retired cops who play poker and solve very old, cold cases. This one has lots of fun twists and surprising things that weren’t discovered when the case was initially investigated, much due to advances in technology. While poker playing is what brings the characters together, there’s none of it in the book, which also suits me, since I don’t find it interesting and the actual play wouldn’t affect or impact the story. The novel should be out standalone in a couple months–a good, fun mystery read!
I didn’t get much writing done at all until last night, when I managed to get almost 1,000 words. It’s amazing how fast and easy the writing goes when you can kick the internal editor out of the way and keep them out. That is what I want to work on this coming ROW80–to kick the internal editor, critical voice out of my head and keep it out so I can get a lot more written this time.
Which leads me to this round’s goals, which I am again keeping simple: Finish the current WIP and get it to the beta readers. That’s it. I also like ROW80 founder Kait Nolan’s goal of writing 20 days out of 30, so I’m adopting something similar: I want to write–something, even if only 100 words–5 days out of every week. So we’ll see how that goes!
What about you–how are you doing on whatever goals you might have, whether writing or not? If you’re participating in ROW80, what are your goals for this round? And have you had any “closings” or openings recently? Please share–I’d love to hear from you!
Jennette Marie Powell writes stories about ordinary people in ordinary places, who do extraordinary things and learn that those ordinary places are anything but. In her Saturn Society novels, unwilling time travelers do what they must to make things right... and change more than they expect. You can find her books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, and more.