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Accountability Post 2021 Week 29

Introduction to the Accountability Post 2021 Week 29

In last week’s post, I set three goals for myself to meet this week:

  1. Wrap up Liam Martin’s Plot Turn 1. He’s the Secretary General of the Sol System Defense Protectorate. His story continues from the first book into the second.
  2. Dive into Atticus Porter’s Plot Turn 1: He had been with TCP in book 1 (minor spoiler!), but he’s in a much different role now.
  3. Maybe, just maybe!, get to Helmine Stein’s Plot Turn 1. She’s the new CEO of TCP.

How’d I do? Well, let me give you the number from last weeks, and we’ll see if that gives you a clue.

Accountability Post 2021 Week 29 By the Numbers

By the end of the previous reporting period, I’d hit 28,664 words. That period ended on July 11. How’d I do this week?

I’m on vacation this week, so I implemented my weekend schedule on Monday and wrote for two hours. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just write; I had to design the Remote-Assisted Attack Craft (RAAC mentioned in the illustration above), and I had to flesh out some other new technologies. I also had to work through how much of those technologies I wanted to show, and the answer is, not a lot. Enough to be convincing, and enough so that if I need to show more later, I can.

I ended the week at 34,657 words, for a total of 10,993 for the week. Finishing my anime reviews on the weekend seems to be helping. My weekly word count is higher than it had been for Book 1.

Did I Hit the Previous Week’s Goal?

I am overjoyed to report that yes, I hit the targets. Also, I started on Ira Malhotra’s Plot Turn 1, which is why I needed to design the new military hardware. I have a few more scenes to complete Malhotra’s scenes. As I started writing her first chapter, I realized I needed to shuffle the order a little. I had introduced her too late. But the change was only to chapter order. The plot braiding I had done before starting to write is really paying dividends in terms of saving me from large amounts of rewrites.

The characters continue to flow. Samuel Beauregard surprised me again, but not nearly as much as he surprised Liam Martin and the Colonel escorting him. The head maid at Atticus Porter’s plantation, Catalina Ojeda, seized the initiative in her opening scenes with Porter, and in a very good way. She helped fill a plot deficiency that I hadn’t recognized yet. Seriously, how does a character do that? The subconscious is a strange thing, as Lynn Sheridan, The Otaku Author, discussed in his recent post Author Journey (July 19, 2021). I just wish the subconscious would send me a memo or something. Though maybe seizing control of characters is its way of sending a memo!

Goals for Next Week

I’m on vacation this week, so maybe I should get aggressive with my goals! But then I’ll probably have to write another “Hopelessly Optimistic” excuse, and I really don’t want to do that. So, this week, I’ll focus on:

  1. Wrapping up Malhotra’s opening scenes
  2. Continuing Martin’s Plot Turn 1, which is, I’m sorry to say, really painful for him
  3. Start making things difficult for Jack Booth and Arabella Davies, which I’m also sorry to say because I like both of them
  4. If I’m really lucky, wrap up the Plot Turn 1s with a closing chapter or two about Atticus Porter

Do your characters sometimes seem to go off on their own? How do you interpret that? I’d love to hear about your approach in the comments!

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