Goals check for the week of January 28

Last week was actually a much better week in most respects, at least compared to the week of January 21st.  It was nice to have a bit of a comeback, both on my novel and on my riding.  I still need to work on making sure I ride both my horses, instead of just Panama, but just having done more writing and riding makes me feel much better about the success of my week.


1. Novels: Tuesday evening I finally did something that has needed to be done for a long time: I sat down with note cards and started working out the exact timeline of my novels.  I still have to finish assigning dates, but the bulk of the work is done.  I really needed a clear "big picture" of when the fictional events occur as opposed to the actual historical events that I've worked into the novel, and I also needed to get an idea of how much time is passing in the first novel.  Working out the timeline also tells me that the first novel needs a little more meat to the middle of it -- I skip to the ending a little too quickly, I think.  It means more work will be involved in revisions that I'd thought, but better to discover this now, right before I start the major revisions on the first novel.

After figuring out (for the most part) the timeline for the series so far, I had an informal write-in with a novelist friend Wednesday night, and I got back to the novel I recently put an ending on.  I needed to go back and write a chapter that I'd skipped over by accident (again, timeline problems), and I worked on that Wednesday and a little bit Thursday.  Nothing since then, but I plan to get back to work on it today.

2. Websites and blogs: I'm getting a little tired of saying "No progress yet" here, so maybe I'll do some of this during the next week.  I will probably start with one of the easier sites that need to be overhauled.

3. Other writing projects: Ditto the above -- getting tired of saying "No progress yet" -- but unfortunately I need to (or at least want to) get to at least a certain point with the website/blogs overhauls before I can get to work on this.

4. Books: As good as my intentions were to get to Les Miz next, I started reading the February selection for the sci-fi/fantasy book club I belong to.  It's a really long book and I wanted to leave myself plenty of time to read it before we meet next.  Hopefully I'll be able to go on to Les Miz after that.

5. Horses: I rode Panama three times last week: Monday, Thursday (for my lesson), and Saturday (for a fun photo shoot -- a friend's husband offered to take pictures of me jumping Panama).  Nothing on Rondo.  Like I said, I need to work on that.

Not a bad week, all said and done -- there are areas I still need to work on, but I am making progress overall, and especially on what I consider the more important things (like the novel and the horses)!