Monday Update - What I've been up to

A lot happened lately in my writing life, so instead of a regular post, I decided to write an update.

Writing Interruptions

Unfortunately it's that time in the year and I have to study for the exams and write those papers. And maybe work on my thesis some more. Which makes it almost impossible to do any actual writing. I'm staying possitive, since I only have one semester left and then, I'll be defending my thesis. And I'll have a new, shiny degree.

Fiction Writing

Since my last update, most of my projects moved forward.

My editor finished correcting the first draft of my bigbang story, and right now I'm fixing the mistakes. It's a painful process, I admit, but I know that it will make my story even better. I need to finish the second draft and send it to another editor before the end of June, because I need to have the final story by the end of July. It's all very exciting, since the feedback so far was completely positive.

The Epic Collaboration Project kinda took over my life. In between what I've written and what my co-author added, we basically wrote almost the entire thing. We still have three chapters to write, with the big climax, and the dramatic reveal, but I'm estimating we should be done with the first draft in maybe two weeks. We already crossed the 30K in wordcount and I think we might reach 40K before we're done.

I completely change the concept of my third big project - the 20K story I need written by September. Mostly because the initial set-up, while dramatic, didn't work with the character development I wanted to have. The scenes I already planned out will probably still happen, and I'll try to rework them into a short story of maybe 5K, but I'll have to outline it to make sure it works.

I also signed up to a writing challenge called HC Bingo. Which is an interesting concept and definitely something of an inspiration. It'll be mostly short stories, but maybe one or two longer ones. We'll see where the muse takes me.

Non-Fiction Writing

Unfortuantely I didn't work on my articles or ebook ideas, due to school and exams. I'm getting slightly worried, because I have to complete 7 more articles for Suite101 by the end of July, and I'd like to add to my articles on Helium as well. And it's not even that I don't know what to write about, it's the lack of time that interrupts with the writing.

Once I'm done with exams, I'll have to really get back into the non-fiction world.

On a plus side, even though I had little time, I managed to keep up with my blogging, which is a huge success. I definitely deserve a cookie. It becomes a part of my weekly routine, writing and posting to this blog. I suspect I'll soon be able to modify that routine to include writing and posting at other places.

Twitter

A mix of writing and networking, I've been active on Twitter, and it's been great fun. Apart from three days when I went offline to study.

I switched from TweetDeck to HooteSuite, because the latter offered me option to schedule my Tweets, which turned out to be extremely helpful since I share a lot of links to writing resources and blog posts. Plus I can keep it in the background and write or work, and it doesn't interrupt me with constant sound effects when somebody update's their account.

I also ventured into the world of Sponsored Tweets. It was more of an experiment, but it turned out to be a very interesting experience. It's not a big thing, nor it's extremely big revenue stream. But I can choose things I want to advertise, I can write the tweets to match my other content and all in all, I'm very pleased with that site. You can check it out for yourself here.