Where I Schedule Articles For Future Publication

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

I have started something new with how I write my articles at Medium. I wrote this piece on 2/24/2022. It is the day after Russia invaded Ukraine. I hope by 7/9/2022, when this article is scheduled to publish, that the war is over and that Ukraine is still an independent Ukraine. But as a psychic, I’m not getting any good feelings about it other than horrible, paralyzing grief.

So, you might ask why am I scheduling my articles so far in advance of when I write them? It is because I hope to be knee-deep in another writing project with NaNoWriMo come July. Over the years they have expanded their writing activities beyond the original novel writing month of November to include a summer camp in July. So, I’m at summer camp right now. There are other activities sponsored by NaNoWriMo, but this year I am focusing on July and November.

What am I working on? I am continuing work on a novel I began in 2021. The working title is, “Daniel’s Story” but that will probably change as the story progresses. I got 13.6k words done on it in November 2021. The reason I didn’t get very far with it was twofold. First, I realized I had a whole lot of research to do and was purchasing books to read in order to have a leg to stand on as far as accurately portraying history was concerned.

Right now, “Daniel’s Story" takes place in the 1880s in South Dakota. That could change, but right now that’s where it is. The other reason I did not progress very far last November with the book is I am not yet comfortable with writing fiction, and it was really slow going because of that. This will be the first time I pick up on a work in progress, reset the word count to 0 and work toward 50,000 for the challenge. I’m not worried about the final length being 63k words because I’m sure a lot of it will go on the cutting room floor either to be recycled into another story or just saved for something else. Or maybe it will just end up being a big book.

The psychic angle involves me having real-time conversations with Daniel the main character in my story. Yes, it was a surprise for me too. He is young enough to be my son or grandson if I had one, but that’s neither here nor there. I am getting old and am not yet ready to write much about old people. I guess that is where the term, “young at heart” might come…