I Know We’ve Just Met, But A Name Would Be Nice.

I’m still puttering along on the new novella I have in progress. The POV rewrite has been done and wasn’t as laborious as I thought it was going to be, which was a nice surprise.

I’m at about 4000 words right now and it’s flowing nicely, when I can get my scattered mind to work on it. That’s an ongoing battle, but I’m getting better about treating it like a job and scheduling it in as time not to be spent doing something else that catches my attention. I have the idea of where I want to get with the story and now I’m just laying the road to get there.

It’s odd that I don’t have a definitive title for the new story yet. Usually it’s one of the first things that come to me, but with this one it’s been mostly living on my hard drive as MatthewJonahStory and nothing has really bitten me as being the title of the story. We’ll have to see if something during the writing process jumps out at me as a possible title.

I also got my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style in the mail recently. Man, that thing is huge and intimidating. Every time I think I should really delve into it, the sheer heft of it makes me think twice. Right now, I’m just using it on a subject by subject basis to try to get myself refreshed on punctuation.

I grew up during that lovely period of time in the Canadian educational timeline where instead of grammar, we were taught phonetics. I don’t know who thought that was a good idea, but it has haunted me as a writer ever since. I know grammar from reading and writing for most of my life, but to name parts and punctuation rules is like me having to translate to a second language in my head. My hope is that some day I’ll be able to do it as second nature and I’m sure my main beta reader Shae will throw a party when that happens.

Okay, back to it. My goal is to be to at least 5k and in Rome in the story by the end of the week.

I wonder if I could write off a trip to Rome on my taxes as a business expense… yeah, I didn’t think so either. =)