This week was an interesting one.  Blizzards, shoveling, blizzards, shoveling.  I’ll admit all of that left me drained physically and mentally.  I was able to push through some of the writing goals I had, but the week ended with a lot left to be done.  I can only blame so much of this on the weather, as the rest lies squarely on my shoulders.  I knew the week was going to get bad and I didn’t take precautions and frontload as much writing into the better days as I should have.

The plan should always be to think of tomorrow as being worse than today in terms of productivity.  Tomorrow could be perfectly fine and productive, or the car could break down or the heating system could die and the day could be spent dealing with that.  Better to assume it will get derailed and focus on the present than to hope for a better tomorrow.

With that said, the rough drafts of four stories were finished.  They are:

• “Fallout Ariel”, originally on the goal list.
• “Ninja Mama”, originally on the goal list under the Kazka 713 “Journeys” theme.
• “Alien Concept”, a flash fiction story that just came to me and had no bearing on the original goals.
• “Listening Post”, originally on the goal list under the Penumbra‘s “superhero” theme.

“Songs of Fate” and “Interstellar Explorers” were not started, though some planning/outlining was accomplished.

On the reading front, I did finish the stories that Daily Science Fiction sent out, and look forward to enjoying more next week.  My goal with this reading is to eventually start reverse-engineering the tales and breaking them down into their component parts.  Such an exercise can only help improve my own grasp of the craft of writing, and it’s something I want to start doing with everything I read.  The more I can understand what goes into an accepted tale, the more likely my own work will find a home in the publications I read.