Happy Friday!
I hope this week has been treating you well, because what a doozy! Nashville got hit with snow, which means I took a hit with my writing schedule.
As ever, I persist and persevere to bring what I hope to be regular installments of The Bright Side, sharing all the ups and downs of working writer/mom/human life.
📕 Book Updates
Lots of ups this week!
I turned in the acknowledgments and dedication for my debut last week, which were harder than I thought. 😅 How do you thank everyone who helps you bring your book and your author career to life? As soon as I hit send, I thought of three more people to add. 🤦🏽♀️ I guess I’ll have to get it in the next round of revisions.
I also updated my author page. I’ve had the domain for more than a year and a rough draft of the page. It turns out that all I needed was a bio request for me to get myself in gear and hit publish.
🏡 Real Life
We got 3-4 inches on Tuesday Night, so the kids were out Wednesday AND Thursday. School closures always put a wrench in the writing day as meal prep, clean up, refereeing, and corraling take place. Always glad for more family time, but I have to say our snack supply is in shambles.
I bought a new planner (A Happy Planner) and love seeing my week fleshed out. This would be the best example of my habit of pretty, productive procrastinations lol. (Everything is better in rainbows, don’t you think?”)
✨ Inspiration
🎯 Goals/Growth
Since transitioning to writing more full-time, I’ve had to learn how to be my own boss/taskmaster. Deadlines for the debut are great to keep me focused, but I needed more structure to ensure the rest of my goals get done.
Current Goal: Finish Rough Draft before March 15th
I’m currently tinkering on an upmarket fiction project and finally hit the 20,000-word mark. 🥳
Right now, I’m fleshing out key scenes as they come and still learning about the characters and their backstories as they tell me their secrets.😉 Once I get a sense of the story’s shape, I’ll reformat it into manuscript form and continue building it out.
✅ Habits Update
As I’ll go into more detail later, I’ve been tracking my writing progress and habits over a number of apps to 1) Be productive and 2) Keep records of the things I’m working on and building.
As you’ll see, as a former teacher coach and advisor, I’m REALLY big on alignment, and I like seeing how my habits and actions match up with my goals and execution.
Time: 23 hours and 17 minutes.
I track my time in Clockify, which is a free app for your phone or computer, where I track “my working” time. This means writing this blog post, my calls with my writing group, working on building trackers, planning, organizing, literally the whole shebang.
You can literally see the impact the weather had on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Words: 8.612 in the new draft
As I shared above, I track my writing sessions to keep a record and remind myself I’m staying on track. I know this is a lot and wouldn’t work for most folks, but it’s nice to see how I build things word by word, scene by scene, session by session.
You can find my writing tracker in my Etsy Store.
I’m planning on reformatting more of the hordes of trackers, templates, and things I make when I should be writing works (Again, think productive procrastination).
😍 Things I’m Loving
As my writing group would probably tell you, I consume a lot of content and all things writing, thinking, and living.
Mrs. Nash’s Ashes: I’m in my sparkly rom-com phase for my current work-in-progress and just finished Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler (loved it). Whenever I was stuck this week, I would read a bit until a spark of inspiration hit me for my own book. I’m currently on the waitlist for her second book, Happy Medium.
Maria Marianayagam: One of my writing friends just launched her middle grade debut, No Purchase Necessary. So happy to see another one of her fabulous projects out in the world. Go Maria!
That’s all for this week!
How about you? Did the weather get you down? Did you get your words up? Share your bright side below :)
Happy Reading and Writing!
-Bri
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