Better(-ish)

I seem to be back to sleeping during the day and being awake at night, which is a pain, and tiring, and I need to fix it, something which usually leaves me even more tired.

OTOH, after very little writing since summer, this week has produced:

First draft of a 5,500 word short story - 'Wheeler', which is deliberately structured to spin a novel out of, and is looking at the idea of whether a wheelchair user can be a space fighter pilot (which I've been noodling over for a while). I'm using Ehlers-Danlos as the disability, so it's very much write what you know. The short story is the Pearl Harbour equivalent, the novel would add the training montage and probably Battle of Britain and/or Doolittle Raid equivalents.

Plans for redrafting 'Titanium Witch', an existing 6000 word short story that targets people's behaviour towards disabled people and how wheelchairs can shape perceptions. The protagonist is a vent-dependent quad, with the SFnal element being exoskeletons as a way to move beyond that. The original plot was a fraud by her deputy, which she stumbles on while having exoskeletal problems, but I've realised I can make the story much stronger if the exoskeletal problems are actually a murder attempt (plus allowing me to deploy an EMP weapon as a plot maguffin). It will become longer as a result, I'll need several extra scenes, but I'll want to keep growth controlled. I want this rewrite done before the end of the year, but may work on it much sooner.

And finally, after a year of sitting on them with writer-brain running in panicked don't-wanna circles, I've figured out how to address Yoon''s beta notes on 'Graveyard Shif't (my Pitch Wars novel). The motivational weaknesses on the bad guy necromancer can be addressed by making him Russian, not Haitian, and tying him into the family backstory of Aleks, the Russian-American protagonist. At the same time that solves my ever increasing discomfort that the bad guy is a stereotypical bad voodoo witchdoctor, even if I do counter that with a very empowered Voudoun Mambo consulting for the good guys. And I can address Yoon's suggestion I drop the third PoV character to concentrate on the interplay between the two leads by rewriting his scenes from Aleks' viewpoint, even the one she definitely isn't there for - teleconferences are a thing, and she's sitting in a business jet while things are happening (idiot! how did you not notice that?). And all of this means committing myself to a complete rewrite in between a month and six weeks, because I want to throw the completed re-draft at  the Angry Robot open submission window.

That's a lot of writing to do between now and Christmas, so I figure talking about it here is a way to keep me on track and logging process, which is something I've stopped doing over the last year or so.