Nine Panel Grid, Gracie, World Famous...

 This week I'm on vacation, and I'm doing something somewhat insane.  I'm working on three different projects simultaneously.

One of them is Nine Panel Grid, my second Kindle Vella project.  (You can follow the progress here.  I've already posted the three chapters you can read for free, and submitted the next one a moment ago.)  This one's a strange beast that I'm tackling one chapter at a time to see how it might evolve.  It's a rare story where I heavily suspect I would have to do revisions once this draft is completed, if I hope for it to be anything more than it currently is.  At any rate it's very interesting to write.

I'm also tackling Gracie, the follow-up to George & Gracie, the title story and lead to my annual Christmas collection that'll be sent out to family.  Here we are in October.  The plan is to write a chapter every day through Sunday, and since I planned for seven chapters, if I manage to keep that up I'll have that part done by then.  (My dad actually asked about this year's Christmas poem yesterday!  He's never interested in my writing.  And this is the first time anyone's anticipated one of these at all, so that was doubly pleasant to hear.  I'll tackle the poem later, which is never very hard to write.)

I'm also having to play catch-up with World Famous, a project I've been working on all year, not a long story, but possibly the longest story I'll have written since I was writing novel manuscripts routinely a decade back.  Two more days and I'll be caught up, so don't worry.  It continually surprises me how easy this one's been to write (but then I'm once again returning to the well of each chapter being from a new perspective, which I've done a number of times at this point in my fiction), and today's was no exception.  It helped I got to put in some dialogue for a change.  I love crazy conversations.  But then, that's the kind you're likely to have with me in the real world, too.  I just have more to say when I'm writing, is all.

So I did all three today.  All I need to do is repeat that twice more.  I'm not sure how many chapters of Nine Panel Grid I want to do this week.  If I do three or four more (counting Thursday and Saturday, which is usually when I work on Kindle Vella chapters; Friday I'll be headed out to watch some movies, so I expect only to work on Gracie), fine.  This one's twenty-two chapters, so I'm not in a rush to finish it like I was Aronnax last vacation, not by any stretch.  I have no specific time-table for it.  Working on it at all this week is a bonus, especially given the other stories.

As of today it's a great way to spend a vacation.  When I was writing novel manuscripts I was either underemployed or not employed at all, or had time to kill under unusual circumstances.  Since I've been working full time at my current job, it's been tough to motivate myself to spend a lot of time writing (even though I desperately want to finally write Collider) (which I hope will happen next year), although I've certainly worked on a number of projects, put out a few story collections this year alone.  

Everyone at work asked me where I was going.  Well, to the library, to a land called Wendale, to right here in Tampa...