April 10th, 2021 – 927

~ Sam Shuttleworth

Sorry sorry sorry, I had a chill day and I wrote late my bad. I’m in a game so I may extend this later but yeah. Writing is going good, novel is gonna overshoot by 6k but whatever. All’s good.

This is a bit unconventional but I decided as I was still awake, what the heck, I’d do a proper post. This is the second night in a row I’ve been awake this late, and while yes I don’t want to make a habit of it, I’ve been socialising on voice chat and playing Phasmophobia with friends and, well it’s helped, a lot. I have no regrets about the impact on my sleep because honestly I’d forgotten how nice it was to have social time that wasn’t text based. Even so I do need to finish my other writing tasks for the day so I can sleep, but I want to talk a bit about TWO, and the 13th deadline.

So I have been saying for a while that I wanted to get this draft done by my birthday, and after a very successful March that appeared to be a given. I was shooting for an 86,000 to 88,000 word novel, and today we hit 87,500 words, so yay. Slight problem, is that I still have a chapter and a half and the epilogue to write. This is going to finish at the 91-92K range. Now that’s fine, good even as you always wanna go over and cut back with impunity, but it does mean I’m now no longer looking at finishing tomorrow as a gurantee, and require a sprint to the finish – a day I write 2K or more of all that’s left – to complete before my birthday.

So how do I feel about that? Honestly, ok, but also I’m toying with the idea of just, well, sprinting right now. I mean it’s now 02:06am and I will not be getting to sleep for a while anyway, so, why not? Not sure. If you see a third update tonight, well you’ll know what I picked. But there’s another curveball on top, and this one is a bizarre one. See, I know the next novel is MAL, and I know roughly what happens, but I have given it next to no thought beyond that, or made any efforts to lay the groundwork. So I may sprint to finish TWO only to stumble out the gate on MAL. I have, like, the prologue/first chapter depending on which I choose, but beyond that I’ve got no beats, and not a whole lot of thought put into perspective. This is going to be an, interesting challenge.

Well, whatever happens, wish me luck. Oh, and try Phasmophobia, that game is legitimately as good as the hype makes it out to be.

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.