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Welcome November 2022

Halloween has hallowent and we’re that much closer to Thanksgiving Day. Good thing the weather is better suited to extensive oven use.

In Disguise

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. ~Margaret Atwood

I don’t know who that old guy in the mirror is, but he sure gets stiff in a lot of inconvenient places.

Fortunately, my free Mondays tend to help me catch up on my beauty sleep.

Unfortunately, my four-day work weeks don’t come with a commensurate reduction in busy-ness.

As always, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I’ve got tons to do and less energy to do it.

Even so, progress must progress, so I burn some off hours to make up the difference.

That’s why this little missive is uncharacteristically delayed. I’m freakin’ busy and I’ve got no time for anything.

Happy November

Happy November Jazz – Sweet Jazz and Bossa Nova Music for Positive Autumn Mood

That’s all the more reason why I enjoy these hours-long stretches of relaxing jazz.

Wouldn’t mind having some new series to geek out about, but I wouldn’t have the time to watch them.

Well, who needs series when you’ve got horror movies to binge from Halloween and Christmas movies to binge leading up to the holiday season.

Some people go for 🏈 football. I’m not one of them. Even before they became annoyingly woke, I wasn’t much of a football fan.

No, for the time being, my time is evenly divided between day job duties, Holiday Season Serial Romance writing, sleeping and whatever else needs doing gets squeezed in between.

Breathing Room

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike

And that’s what I get when I actually sit down and get to writing. I’ve been averaging 3000 words per session, but I’ve been starting too late in the day to get more than one session in.

I’ll have to give that a try this weekend. I’ve already gotten enough story to get me to December, but I need to be much farther along than that if I’m going to be done before Thansgiving.

Actually, I just checked and I’m already up to December 3rd, which isn’t bad considering the late start I got.

So, my standard approach seems to be working again this year. I start with a basic idea of the characters, the setup and a couple of basic conflicts and I imagine the rest.

When I’m done a session, I export the work in progress from Scrivener to MS Word, print to PDF, drop it in my GDrive, download it to my phone and then play it with my text to speech app while I go to sleep.

That gets me about three days worth of next steps. Hopefully, I can start a bit earlier this weekend and maybe get 5000 words per session. If I start early enough, I might even be able to manage another 7000 word day.

That’s all well and good for Merry 🔔 Bells, but none of the above is getting me a word further with The Sentinels.

I simply haven’t the time.

I barely have time for Merry 🔔 Bells. I’ve still got to properly edit the episodes, format them for Christmas All The Time and prepare the episode graphics. I was making a mental list of episode names, but those are likely to fall out of my head if I don’t soon list them.