This weekend is birthday weekend–not mine, but one that I’m happy to celebrate anyway. In this case, the birthday present required a lot of work out of the office, hauling trash and old furniture out of the house, reorganizing a few work spaces, and generally reworking the kitchen so that there’ll be room for making hot stone pizza tomorrow night, and having some company over for the festivities.

One of the downsides of living in the same building where you work is that it’s easy to de-prioritize household chores. Between writing and running two businesses (AWP and my freelance audio work), there’s always something more important than vacuuming, or taking out the trash, or making sure the groceries are taken care of. Periodically, this means you’ve got to take a day out and get everything back in order, or you start tripping over your own furniture–and it’s embarrassing to sprain your ankle because you tripped over the coffee table. I’ve done that a couple times in my life, and it’s not an experience I’m keen to repeat.

In between shifts working on the house, I got in some beach time. Got a bit of agate-hunting in, too. The beach here is filled with agates and jasper and all other manner of semi-precious stones, and since I got a lesson in finding them, it’s become a bit of an obsession. I’ve now got a mantle covered with jars filled with gorgeous little raw gemstones that serve no practical purpose, but look gorgeous and are gobs of fun to collect. One of these days soon I’ll have to do a post about this ridiculously-addictive hobby, with pictures.

Third shift, starting at about eleven PM today, I did another pile of admin work. More ebooks queued up for release, and delivered to the Patreon supporters of both the Antithesis podcast and the NaNoWriMo Every Month podcast–feels good to finally get those off the to-do list. Hopefully they make for some riveting reading for those of you who are thusly subscribed, as well.

I finally settled into writing, fourth shift only, at about four in the morning. Today was centered largely on a major summit at Camp David, called because of the events at the end of Free Will. It seems like the whole Solar System is teetering on the brink of disaster, and things just keep getting worse and worse…which is, of course, what makes it fun 🙂

So, here’s the damage on Book 3:
Starting Word Count 27.263
Ending Word Count 29,011
For a grand total today of 1748 words.

I am really looking forward to the day, hopefully not too many days hence, when I can write for two or three shifts a day instead of just the one. The book is already rolling away beneath me, and if I can ramp up the writing time I’m gonna make very short work of it.

Which makes me feel kind of stupid for hiding from this project for as long as I did.

29,011 / 120000 words