I had initially thought that I was going to have this super productive night, as I’d had a mildly productive week.
LOL, nope. Insomnia struck. It’s very very rare that I have an insomnia attack that’s quite this bad. Usually, it’s I can’t sleep for one night and then I crash and mostly fix it the next night. Not this week. The insomnia attack started this past Thursday, and instead of crashing and fixing Friday night, it kept going. So far, I’ve clocked about 9 hours of sleep since Thursday morning. Now, this sounds like it’s about 3 hours a night. It wasn’t. 8 of those hours were in the form of four two hour blocks between Thursday morning and Saturday night – Saturday nights being the one night of the week I really don’t get to sleep. Why? Because my mundane job has me sitting at the front desk for 13 hours straight. I know, I haven’t explained that last hour or so of sleep. 15 minutes of it was a tiny nap right before I had to be at work Saturday night. 25 minutes of it was my break. The rest of it, 3 minutes at a time cat naps – some of the most aggravating things I know how to do, but if I do it for a long enough window of time, it does actually help me fend off the extreme exhaustion. (When I get off at 7 this morning, I will be headed straight home, and with any luck, straight to bed.)
I’ve got three days to get my tail end into gear and get O’Mally’s Station retyped and finished. I’ve got the edit back, and I’ve got about 5 pages of 18 blended together of a final edit of mine with the editor’s edit. (I was working on my “preposition problem” independent of his edit.) I’m going to be submitting O’Mally’s Station to a magazine – as long as I can keep it under it’s current word count. Why? Because it’s already frightfully close to the maximum word count that this magazine accepts (6,000, OMS is sitting at around 5,900) – and because I’d like to come in under the word count it’s already sitting at (aka because I want to).
This does mean that my inital plan of having two sets of The Aurora Chronicles short stories out gets changed. At the moment, I’ve really got little to nothing – I’ve got about 40% of Station 321 completed, and little to nothing completed of the set that opens the entire series. Right now, it’s looking more like I’m going to finish O’Mally’s Station and move on to my stand alone story called Last Ship Out – which I’m going to try and keep under 4,000 words, on the off chance that for one, I’ll get it completed in time to possibly submit it to the Writer’s Digest Annual short story competition. I’ll also be working on Blindly Stargazing – one of the novels in The Aurora Chronicles series, with hopes to shop it around to agents around august. I’m hoping it’s different enough to get interest, and hopefully sell before the end of the year.
Odds are also good that I’ll get off my rump and finish Underwater Metropolis, and do a lot more work on Of Mage Lights and War Machines. Both of those are novels, and UM at least I know for a fact that I will be self publishing. I just have to finish working out the pieces of the plot that I’m unsure of. OMLaWM has a completed plot, I’m just terrible at writing battle scenes and I knew this going into it. I’ve got it all lined up, it’s pending a full rewrite – which I’m simply not ready to do yet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to generate some interest in it as well.
I think I’ve figured out how to make myself do the things – this is going to be an interesting week to see if I can do it – get my shit together and properly time manage, which is one of my largest weaknesses.