Tag: photos

Broken bone

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Not my broken bone, but a dinosaur’s — apatosaurus, I think. This broken femur fossil is on display at the geology museum of the Colorado School of Mines. This was one of our stops this summer on vacation. To the extent I can, I plan to combine the daily Inktober prompts with vacation photos to plan my sketches this month. Today’s prompt was “divided.”

Sketch:
sketch of broken dinosaur fossil
Reference photo:
broken dinosaur femur, fossilized
Got words in, too!

Today’s words: 1,573
Words 2017: 166,296
Average words/day: 605

With the bug this weekend, my daily word count suffered, but I’m still making progress.

The heat is gone

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At least we’re getting a temporary break in the weather, although it’s supposed to be back above 80 by this time next week.

The past couple days have been more productive, with a few things done off my list, including getting the newsletter out. And words! Over 1,600 yesterday, and even more today.

Words today: 2,317
Words this month: 9,412
Words 2017: 164,723
Average words/day 2017: 608

I don’t know if I can get my daily average back over 1,000 words/day before the end of the year, but I’m certainly going to try. (For those who are curious but don’t want to do the math, this requires an average of 2,130 words each day for the rest of the year.) At any rate, it’s words, I’m making progress, and I’m happy.

Almost equal 

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Autumnal equinox is tomorrow. I’ve always loved fall, crunching leaves under foot, sipping cider… not so much the growing dark, but we can’t have everything.

Wrote 262 words today, in addition to freelance works and having the kids home from school. Not much, but it’s progress.

Sedum flowers

Distracted faction

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I started tracking! Or, well, I started to start. Except I forgot some categories I wanted to use (like “social” and “personal”), and I stopped tracking after I actually started getting anything done. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.


So what did I spend the rest of my day on? Discussing Oreos on Twitter, working on different ways of looking at the data from the SFWA survey (like which member categories have more females than males), and going to the open house at our son’s school.

After that, got home, talked with our daughter about her homework, got her to bed, and wrote 252 words. Still not where I want to be, but better than the last few days.

Slowing down again

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Last week went even better than I’d thought, with several days over 1,000 words. This week is being more of a struggle — not sleeping as well, trouble focusing, barely eking out a hundred words or so each day (119 today, for those keeping score). As I said in my newsletter — which went out today, a couple days late — I’m considering tracking my time to see how much I’m spending in the different areas of my life. If you’ve got experience or anecdotes about your own time tracking methods, drop them in the comments. I’m interested!

Meanwhile, I’ll be working on enjoying fall and watching the changing seasons around me. Here, one of our holly bushes is covered with berries, but they haven’t begun to redden yet.


And here we have the sedum, the flowers just starting to open.

Big joys and small joys

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Big joy: The OPPM was released to SFWA’s membership today. Yes, it had the caveat that it’s always a work in progress, and will be updated in the future, but it’s out!

Another big joy: I got good words today. Well, I’ll know if they’re actually good later, but it’s certainly a good amount.

Words written today: 1,071
Words written this month: 2,041
Words written 2017: 157,352
Average words/day 2017: 634
Books completed 2017: 2 (plus 1 novella)
Pages read today: nothing yet
Books read 2017: ? (Yes, I still need to figure that out.)

But look at that — twice the number of words I set as my goal! *happy dance*

Small joy: Season 7 of My Little Pony is out on Netflix, finally, so my daughter did her own little happy dance. (The Internet was reporting it was supposed to be out last month, but no such luck.)

Small sadness: It’s pouring rain, which means I won’t be going to the weekly meet-up of the NaNo group writers. But I miss more often than I go, so it’s only a small sadness.

Rainy day

Turn of the month

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Happy September! And so the first week of the school year has passed, and the early stages of fall are upon us.

I got 114 words today. I also totaled up my August work, and I’m not terribly thrilled with it — only 8,802 words for the month, an average of less than 300 per day. Clearly, I have to do better this month.

More loose ends

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Although I did write yesterday, I got to it so late, I didn’t bother posting. For the record, I got 101 words yesterday and 160 today.

So many things to juggle — SFWA work on the OPPM, invoicing for copyediting, finishing up an application for the Sustainable Arts Foundation’s award for writers who are also parents, taking the kids shopping for shoes (and pants for the girl, as she outgrew last year’s), back to school night to meet teachers, school paperwork — and that’s just today and yesterday. As I said, lots of loose ends, and this week is just about tying some of them off.

One of the girl’s homework assignments is to bring leaves to school so they can classify them. Maybe I should send a hosta leaf with her.