My goal with Feat of Clay, the sequel to A Furnace Sealed, is to try to get at least 1000 words/day done. I haven’t always been able to do that, thanks to various other projects that poke in — a novella outline here, a comics outline there, an editing project there, not to mention my writing obligations for Tor.com — but I’ve been making steady progress, which is a good thing. I’ve written eight of the sixteen chapters the outline calls for, and I’ve just passed the 30,000-word mark. Yes, that makes for a 60,000-word book, but I’m sure words will be added once the first draft is finished, and also, I write short novels. I’m the anti-Brandon Sanderson. *laughs*

Wrenn and I are just waiting for it to be our turn to get vaccinated. The phase that New York is in includes my parents, thank goodness, but doesn’t include us. Meantime, we’re continuing as we have been since March 2020: staying in as much as possible, doing all our grocery shopping by ordering stuff ahead of time (by phone with the small shops in Little Italy; via Instacart with the big grocery stores) and picking it up, and doing laundry on Wednesdays when the laundromat is generally empty. We’ve got regular online things we’re doing with friends: I’ve got a weekly poker game, Wrenn has a weekly role-playing game, I have a daily social thing, Wrenn has a weekly social gathering, I’ve been doing karate over Zoom between two and four times a week, and I’ve also been doing a crapton of online interviews and panels and things that have been filling in for the convention-going that hasn’t happened in ten months.

We’ve been bingeing The West Wing of late, which has been much more fun since the 20th of January than it was prior. I also haven’t been obsessively checking Twitter and CNN because I’m worried that the country is going to go down in flames. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still checking both, just not with the same fervency and fright that I was when the previous occupant of the White House was still in office. And damn, that was a brilliant show. Before going to bed last night, we watched “17 People,” which is one of the best episodes of any television show ever. Any time you put Richard Schiff and Martin Sheen together, it’s dramatic gold, and what’s especially impressive about these scenes is that John Spencer — who usually dominates whatever room he’s in — is the wallflower in those scenes. Having said that, the Spencer-Schiff bits are just as powerful, as Toby has be the voice of reason to Leo (roles that are usually reversed) because Leo is thinking of Bartlet way too much as his friend and not enough as the President.

Today, the goal is to write another thousand words of Feat of Clay. Chapter 9 here I come!

What are you up to?