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julesjonesSudden outbreak of writing-related work today. The walk yesterday afternoon to the post office to post my Distant Horizons submission obviously helped shift the last of the jet-lag fuzziness.
First up was doing my duty as a focus group member for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autopope on his current WIP. I've had the editor's equivalent of writer's block for the last couple of years, and I started doing the book reviews on Amazon just before Christmas partly as a way of breaking that. Something seems to have worked, because I actually *enjoyed* doing the beta-reading, instead of finding it an unpleasant and difficult chore. Of course, it helps that I know going in that I will be looking at something that is readable even as is.:-) But I think it's also that it's a group rather than just me -- I had to drop out of the group on the last WIP because of a bad case of Real Life, but on the couple of segments I saw then, I was finding it a lot less stressful than the idea of being *the* beta-reader on something.
predatrix and I went digging for the piece of new Syndicate story we started while I was staying with her at New Year. After half an hour of frantic rummaging through mail archives at both ends, and file searches on all machines on her LAN -- she found it in installments in the electronic stickies on her Mac. We *couldn't* find Netmeeting on any of her 'Doze machines, or on the MS website, so it was cut-n-paste into a chat box instead of being able to see the same Word window at each end of the link. And the voice link was appalling -- I suspect my phone company of being one of those who've installed the software that messes up VOIP just enough to encourage you to make a landline call instead. In spite of all the trauma, we managed to get 330 new words down before she staggered off to bed. Having to deal with a very poor link was pretty exhausting, so I didn't bother moving on to my solo WIP, but it's good to have done my 300 word minimum for the day.
First up was doing my duty as a focus group member for
autopope on his current WIP. I've had the editor's equivalent of writer's block for the last couple of years, and I started doing the book reviews on Amazon just before Christmas partly as a way of breaking that. Something seems to have worked, because I actually *enjoyed* doing the beta-reading, instead of finding it an unpleasant and difficult chore. Of course, it helps that I know going in that I will be looking at something that is readable even as is.:-) But I think it's also that it's a group rather than just me -- I had to drop out of the group on the last WIP because of a bad case of Real Life, but on the couple of segments I saw then, I was finding it a lot less stressful than the idea of being *the* beta-reader on something.predatrix and I went digging for the piece of new Syndicate story we started while I was staying with her at New Year. After half an hour of frantic rummaging through mail archives at both ends, and file searches on all machines on her LAN -- she found it in installments in the electronic stickies on her Mac. We *couldn't* find Netmeeting on any of her 'Doze machines, or on the MS website, so it was cut-n-paste into a chat box instead of being able to see the same Word window at each end of the link. And the voice link was appalling -- I suspect my phone company of being one of those who've installed the software that messes up VOIP just enough to encourage you to make a landline call instead. In spite of all the trauma, we managed to get 330 new words down before she staggered off to bed. Having to deal with a very poor link was pretty exhausting, so I didn't bother moving on to my solo WIP, but it's good to have done my 300 word minimum for the day.