Short and Sweet ROW80 Check In

oom!

That was the sound of me flying by. I've been eradicating square brackets all day, which involves, at times, Googling such random things as "ledger vs journal vs ship's log", "Spanish medieval units of length", "canonical hours", "indolent vs impudent", "mithridate" and so on.

Please to say I only got distracted twice, once to join the latest thread on the Compuserve Books and Writers Community about possible titles for Diana Gabaldon's next book in the Outlander series (octopi, anyone?), and now to distill what I did today into a check in for A Round of Words in 80 Days.

It occurs to me that I've been assuming in the last few check ins that everyone coming by knows what ROW80 is, but there may be many of you that don't, so here's a brief recap:

"A challenge that happens 4 times a year with a break between sessions. [Round 2 started April 4 and Round 3 starts in two weeks.]

You have 80 days for your Round of Words.

Your goal can be anything you like as long as it is MEASURABLE.

If you're already in the middle of a WIP, that's fine. Tailor your goal to suit that. You may even want to set mini goals (I want to finish the last 40k of this novel. Then I want to spend the last 20 days revising it at x pages a day). There are a lot of elements to writing a book other than the writing itself. Plotting. Outlining. Character Interviews. Whatever. Set your goal to match wherever you are right now on your WIP. If you want to use your Round for editing a novel, that's fine too. Just know that this is, at heart, a writing challenge, so all the weekly inspirational posts will be geared in that direction."

There you have it! So, as part of my goal to finish editing Out of the Water, I've spent all of today (and a couple of hours each day last week) moving scenes around, making the story tighter (I hope), removing square brackets and rewriting the ending.

Hope everyone else is doing well!