Right to Work!

Just a short entry today - I'm diving right in to work. It's been a pretty productive week, even factoring in an early stop yesterday so I could attend a piano recital at my kids' school.

I posted on Tuesday that I really wanted to get at least chapter 6 done, and chapter 7 would be awesome. Well, I expect to "finish" chapter 7 this morning, with one caveat. My wife has been busy and she's a little behind giving me a "final read" on thee chapters, so I likely won't get her feedback right away. I don't consider these chapters truly finished until I've had her eyes on them to make sure I haven't missed anything major. But hell, I'm thrilled that 6 and 7 are almost done. I'm going to start in on chapter 8 today, and it's actually not out of the realm of possibility that 8 could be done by end of day tomorrow. That puts me halfway through my written chapters, and I'm expecting several of my later chapters to need minimal re-writing, because I've re-written them extensively already. On the other hand, chapters 11 and 12 have a half-page of notes that need to go into them, so those will slow me down. Such is life - two steps forward and one step back is preferable to the other way around.

I've also gotten some fresh information from another friendly stranger about the history of Kenpo karate here in Central New York. I'm really starting to think again that a conversation with Rick Iannuzzo and possibly Master Thompson (if I can track him down) would be very helpful in understanding my style's lineage. I just want to make sure before I do that that I've done my homework to know what I'm talking about before I try to conduct interviews with these experts.

I also need to spend some time documenting and organizing what I've already learned. I'm not sure when I'll be doing that, though.

Lastly, I've managed to accumulate another handful of handwritten notes pages that I need to organize and enter into my OneNote notebooks so they'll be useful. They include lots of notes for my current novel, as well as a handful of fresh story ideas (for new novels or short stories that I haven't worked on yet) and the odd note for my two novels that are "in the works" but not currently being actively written. Which is to say, I've got tons and tons of notes, research and reference material for them, but I haven't actually sat down as started to write them. One of those novels is definitely next up when the current one is done, and where I go after that will depend on how long it takes to write it and where I stand with my current novel in terms of publication. If things were to go well and somebody bit on my first novel quickly, I'd need to break off any other work to get that one ready for publication and probably move straight on to its two sequels. But that's all way in the future and topped with a generous dollop of wishful thinking.