I’m Kristen Tate—editor, writer, and proprietor of the Blue Garret. I’m currently chronicling the process of revising and self-publishing my next book in these subscriber-only newsletters. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of this email. Thanks for joining me at the garret!

It is week twenty-two of 2024. How is the writing going for you right now? This email is going out in the middle of a three-day weekend in many countries—I hope that means many of you are resting!

Here at the garret, I have gotten lots of good rest over the last couple weeks and feel like I’m chomping at the bit to get back to the book. I’m writing this on Saturday afternoon, and I’ve got a three-hour window I can give to it. I’ve got my desk in standing position, St. Vincent on the speakers (I’m going to see her tonight!), and feel full of energy, so let’s see how much I can get done.

Here’s where I was in week 20, for a starting reference point:

May 10 snapshot

⏱️ 85 hours to date

☑️ 125 to-do list items

✅ 52 to-do items completed

📑 Draft #4: 53/260ish? pages

Previous installments: Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 7, Week 8, Week 10, Week 12, Week 14

It’s three hours later – so what did I get done?

First, I looked at my schedule and set up some tentative dates for key milestones. I’ve blocked off the week of June 10 for working only on the book, and I’m hoping to draft 3 of the 4 remaining chapters during that time. I’ll reassess then, but if that works out, I’m hoping to have all the writing and revision tasks complete by the middle of July, which I think will set me up for a publication date in mid-September.

In addition to those four chapter drafts, I’ve got twelve more tasks to accomplish in the writing and revision checklist, so I’m going to zero in on those. A few of them are tasks that need to done on the whole document after all the drafting is done (like evaluating and revising the takeaways for each chapter). But a group of the tasks involve redoing illustrations, and I already had success at that during my last working sessions, so that’s where I decide to focus my time.

I scanned through all of the remaining illustrations and added notes about what they were to the to-do lists in Trello so I can visualize them a bit better. Then, I went back to the technique I worked with last time and tried to enlist ChatGPT to help me find new ways to visualize this data.

This time was a lot more frustrating! ChatGPT gave me a lot of guff, refusing to understand spreadsheets I uploaded and being obtuse about what I wanted to do. To be fair, I gave it a more complex task, asking it to help me with illustrations for my chapter on the structure of The Searcher by Tana French.

I played around with a lot of options for showing the overall structure of the novel in a visual way similar to what I created myself and just haven’t gotten there yet. But when I abandoned that effort and moved on to a bubble graph for the intensity chart, I did make a breakthrough. The colors are still wrong and there are other adjustments I want to make, but this is starting to be useful.

ChatGPT did help me get my data right once again, showing me how to combine what had been three columns into one.

I also had a bit of a breakthrough in realizing that all of my novel charts are going to unfold with the chapters across the horizontal X axis, since they always unfold in time. Probably this is obvious to someone used to thinking in charts, but it was not obvious to me!

Realizing this frees me up to be braver in my own experimentations with Flourish’s many, many options.

So where does that leave me? Drumroll, please…

May 25 snapshot

⏱️ 88 hours to date

☑️ 127 to-do list items

✅ 53 to-do items completed

📑 Draft #4: 53/260ish? pages

Previous installments: Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 7, Week 8, Week 10, Week 12, Week 14

Yep, I checked one thing off and added two more. Sigh. I won’t be discouraged though. I still feel full of energy, and I’ll be back at it later this week. I know clearly now what my next ten steps are and exactly when and how I’m going to do them, and that invisible work counts for a lot!

Our Thing of Joy this week is a beautiful article about a small fine-arts press here in San Francisco. See, good things are still alive and well when we look for them!

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

*Note: For those wondering, I used the paid version of ChatGPT, which gives you access to the most advanced model as well as tools for uploading, downloading, and analyzing various kinds of files. And, no, I don’t use it for writing this newsletter! It might be good at this kind of writing someday, but it certainly isn’t yet. This newsletter is a thinking space for me – it would be impossible for me to even tell ChatGPT what to write because I must discover it as I put the words on the page.

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