Well, I missed my Week 2 check in. Work was busy, a few things happened in my personal life that required my attention, and then there were new books that I needed to read right this very minute. (Reviews of some of these books will resume in May, for the interested.) With all of those things conspiring to distract me from my writing, there wasn’t even really that much going on to check in with. A few hundred words got written in the few slow moments at work, but otherwise I was unproductive for most last week.

And then this week I had the realization that something I had decided should begin Character #2’s story—mostly for the sake of balance; everything seemed to be happening to Character #1—actually made much more sense for Character #1’s story in the long run. Which meant that a lot of what had already been written would eventually go into the trash anyway. For the sake of keeping a word count, they remain in this project’s Scrivener document, but it’s somewhat disheartening to remember that they’ll likely be scrapped in any future drafts. I know this is part of the writing process, but when progress forward—in sheer word count terms—is as slow and small as mine is currently, it’s still a little sad.

Still, I continue to peck away at the keyboard, producing a few words here and there. It has quite a few similarities to a book I love and reread a few weeks ago, and while I’m not entirely concerned about that right now, I know it’s something any future draft will have to address. That being said, I remain delighted with the general theory of the story I’m trying to tell, even if I haven’t quite got it all figured out yet.

P.S. I finally got fed up with copy-pasting em dashes into my blog posts when I’m writing them on PCs instead of my Mac, and I finally bothered to look up the keyboard shortcut for em dashes on a PC. It’s not nearly as convenient or fast as on a Mac, but I’m still fairly delighted with myself.

• Current Word Count: 3,497