‘Tis the season for Real Life Family Events (RLFEs). They stalked me all week. Again. Was I able to hit my word count targets? Did my house give up any secrets — like a room I could use as a recording booth for audiobooks? Plus, this week I ran into a major technical issue with Scrivener — an issue that almost derailed my schedule to publish Wayland’s Hammer. How much time did it cost me? Was I able to salvage the manuscript? Before we get into any of that, let’s look at the key performance indicators.
Last Week’s Progress By the Numbers
I hit my word count target, but it was a near thing!
I feel like I’m wearing out! To be honest, I thought that by my age, the sheer number of commitments would stabilize. Nope. Most of it’s good stuff, and my life is richer because of it. Some of it — having to fight a decidedly un-American regime in my own country — is really not something I had wanted to have to deal with.
But like Gandalf said, we can only do what we can do. And if we don’t do it, it’s harder for the other people fighting the good fight. And anyway, my little thought experiment called Wayland’s Hammer showed me that a) being a Nazi is too freaking easy and b) being a Nazi can only end in one way.
I just hope we can contain the pain to those who instigated all this.
The bottom line is that I hit my word count targets by pushing through Tuesday and Wednesday nights though I had a lot of other stuff going on. Fingers crossed this week is more quiet!
Wayland’s Hammer Book 2: Resistance Movement and Scrivener
I’ve written and published twelve novels using Scrivener. Wayland’s Hammer will take that count to fifteen, and I’ve started number sixteen: The Fissure Kings Book 1: Semele’s Lament. Yesterday (Saturday), when trying to upload Resistance Movement to Amazon, I noticed something: the italics were missing for chapters two through twenty-one. They worked just fine in chapter one and chapters twenty-three through thirty-four.
My alpha and beta readers noticed it. So did my proofreader. At the time, I had just chalked it up to Microsoft Word being Microsoft Word. Honestly, I’m surprised when it doesn’t stab me in the back. But on Saturday, I used Vellum to compile the manuscript and uploaded. When I started my review, I saw that the italics were missing.
That kicked off an effort that lasted the rest of the day. You can read the conversation thread on Scrivener’s support forum here. No matter what I did, I could not get the italics to carry through to the Word document that Vellum used as its input. The italics showed up just fine in the original Scrivener documents.
I thought I had a workaround (the underlining approach I mentioned in the support thread), but it turned out to be inconsistent. I entered a support ticket per Vincent_Vincent’s suggestion (and I gotta give the man credit — he helped out on the evening of July 4th, and he didn’t have to — I really appreciated that).
So I’ve opened the ticket. The software developer in me refused to give up, so I tried one more thing. I created a completely empty Scrivener project and copied only the manuscript’s chapter files into it. I didn’t expect it to work; like Vincent_Vincent, I was absolutely convinced the problem was some combination of keys I’d accidentally entered that messed up the chapter files. I’ve never been happier to be proven wrong. The compile was perfect. I’ve even uploaded it to Amazon and configured it to be on pre-sale.
I still want to fix it. The next manuscript looks okay, but now I’m uneasy. I hope tech support can come through!
Fun with Portable Recording Studios
The little recording cube I bought isn’t going to work for me. My house is too loud. I thought about renting time in a local studio, but with my ability to attract RLFEs, that wasn’t going to work. IT would cost buckets of cash, too.
I decided to try a “Portable recording studio.” That can mean a lot of things, all the way up to a four or five thousand dollar structure. But I wasn’t about to invest that kind of money. Instead, I found something for under two hundred dollars. Still a lot, but not catastrophically so.
I really don’t think that guitar would fit comfortably.
Basically, it’s a series of PVC pipes, some clips, a few moving blankets, an LED lamp, and a stand for a laptop. I’m going to substitute a microphone stand, but the rest should work. It arrived this week. Along with a massive heat wave here in Ohio. Free air temperatures approached one hundred Fahrenheit.
I don’t have enough free space in any interior room, so I hoped to set it up in the back of the garage. But with the summer temperatures, I think I’d pass out before finishing a chapter. The sound of me crashing to the floor would be annoying to edit out. So it seems l like I’ll only be able to record in the fall, winter, and spring. I can live with that.
I just need to clear out enough space in the garage to set it up and leave it set up. Build and tear-down time will absolutely discourage me from recording.
Progress Against Last Week’s Goals
Here’s how I did against this week’s goals:
- Write four new chapters in The Fissure Kings Book 1: Semele’s Lament: Done!
- Monitor proofreading progress for Wayland’s Hammer Book 3: Ongoing! My proofreader is making excellent progress.
- Monitor audiobook recording progress for The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone: Ongoing! Summer Foovay is making excellent progress, too!
- Evaluate locations for the portable recording studio after taking delivery: Done!
- Compare my wife’s old Shure microphone to my Rode microphone and decide which’ll work better for audiobooks: Done! I’m leaning toward using the Shure microphone.
Goals for the Week in Progress Report 2026 Week 27
Here’s what I hope to accomplish this week:
- Write four new chapters in The Fissure Kings Book 1: Semele’s Lament
- Take delivery of the proofread Wayland’s Hammer Book 3: Lines of Operation
- Apply the proofreader’s suggestions to Wayland’s Hammer Book 3: Lines of Operation
- Put Lines of Operation up for pre-sale
- Monitor audiobook recording progress for The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone
- Publish Wayland’s Hammer Book 1: Duty of Prisoners
- Set up the Facebook ad and promotions for Duty of Prisoners
What Do You Think?
What’s the biggest disaster a word processor has inflicted on you? How did you recover? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!