I’m pushing myself to not fall into bad habits again.

                  I have restarted this project way too many times and the urge to restart again is rearing its ugly head. I won’t be giving in. The opportunity to start a second draft is just on the horizon and I just need to hold on a little longer, write some more scenes, and basically just finish off the ending before I can move onto the next step.

                  I know the second draft will be hard work. I need more detail, potentially more scenes that I haven’t thought of yet. And definitely some major editing needs to happen.

                  But the first draft is supposed to be garbage.

                  Unless you’ve been doing this full-time for decades, a clean first draft is hard to come by. And if you’re like me and this is the first novel you’re finishing to completion, then you shouldn’t be beating yourself up over the first draft being a dumpster fire.

                  And trust me, I need that reminder just as much which is why I’m putting it on the internet.

                  I’m glad today was better than yesterday. I actually wrote!!! Hurrah! I also will be doing an edit on a short story I did for Writing Battle last year and posting it soon. I did a little crappy cover I made in Canva for it too. I even started looking at big-girl software for real published books and tinkered with that.

                  I’ve realized making covers in big-girl software is hard…but still we persevere.

It’s not completely out of the question of commissioning an artist for a cover but I’d like to see if I can save the cost especially as this would be my first novel and I’ve yet to make a dime from a single thing I’ve written in my entire life. As of right now I’m trying Affinity. It’s a relatively inexpensive software that I can get directly onto my MacBook so if it’s possible for me to learn it and it be effective, it would be easier and overall cheaper than turning to Adobe. We’ll see though. I’m going to experiment and keep y’all posted on my findings.

On to word counts!!!

Project Prophecy: 51,129

Project Ghosted: 3389 (She writes with her hand over her eyes trying to hide from the lack of change in that number)

Stay writing so that at least one of us is making progress…

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