Write Every Day: Day 7

[regshoe]

Check-in post for 7 May. Please say what day you're checking in for, to avoid confusion about timezones, and let me know if I've missed you in a tally.

It's getting into baby bird season here, and this morning I had a wonderful sighting—a coot (Fulica atra) sitting on its nest, with a little gaggle of adorable scruffy chick heads poking out from beneath the parent bird :D (What coot chicks look like, for reference).


Tally for the month so far:

Day 7: china_shop, regshoe, zero_pixel_count

Day 6: amedia, badly_knitted, cefyr, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, garonne, kate, lferion, ljm, luzula, muccamukk, phantomtomato, philomytha, regshoe, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, vendettadays, yasaman, ysilme, zero_pixel_count

Day 5: amedia, badly_knitted, carenejeans, cefyr, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, garonne, kate, lferion, luzula, muccamukk, phantomtomato, philomytha, regshoe, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme, zero_pixel_count

Day 4: amedia, badly_knitted, black_bentley, carenejeans, cefyr, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, garonne, kate, lferion, ljm, luzula, muccamukk, phantomtomato, philomytha, regshoe, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, stonepicnicking_okapi, sylvanwitch, trobadora, vendettadays, yasaman, ysilme, zero_pixel_count

Day 3: amedia, badly_knitted, black_bentley, carenejeans, cefyr, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, garonne, kate, lferion, ljm, luzula, muccamukk, phantomtomato, philomytha, regshoe, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, stonepicnicking_okapi, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, vendettadays, yasaman, ysilme, zero_pixel_count

Day 2: amedia, badly_knitted, black_bentley, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, garonne, kate, lferion, ljm, luzula, muccamukk, phantomtomato, philomytha, regshoe, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, stonepicnicking_okapi, sylvanwitch, trobadora, vendettadays, yasaman, ysilme, zero_pixel_count

Day 1: amedia, badly_knitted, black_bentley, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, garonne, kate, lferion, ljm, luzula, muccamukk, phantomtomato, philomytha, regshoe, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, trobadora, vendettadays, yasaman, ysilme, zero_pixel_count


My check-in for day 7: After a dispiriting afternoon (housemate doing DIY; destruction to all power tools), I've managed to revive enough to write 550 words.

Comments

[sylvanwitch]

Those itty coots are ADORABLE! Yesterday on my walk, I got to watch three baby grey squirrels chasing each other around the hole in a tree where they obviously nest. SO CUTE!

Ugh, sorry about the DIY noise. That's the pits. I hope the project at least turns out cool, though! YAY for words despite the chaos. :-)

On Day 7, I added 444 post-coital words to Chapter 12, finishing it.

[regshoe]

Aww, those baby squirrels sound very cute :D The project is replacing the porch doors, and frankly I'd much rather have wonky porch doors than power tool noise, but apparently the loud bit is done now.

And hooray for a finished chapter! Lovely for you and the characters, it sounds like :D

[badly_knitted]

Baby coots are cute! I wish I lived near water so I could watch the waterfowl.

May 7th - 1000 words, 5 double drabbles. That's not what I intended to write, but after I wrote this week's drabble for my drabble community I completely forgot about the prompt on another community that I'd planned to write for and just wound up writing more drabbles *sigh* I need additional memory for my brain.

[regshoe]

Oh dear, that does sound a bit confusing! But very well done for those five double drabbles :D

[badly_knitted]

Thanks. I always need more drabbles to keep to my posting schedule, so they won't go to waste, but it's a little annoying. I was looking forward to writing for the prompt. I'm getting forgetful in my old age though. I only remember things that aren't important.

[luzula]

Baby coots! I have seen them before, and wondered what those orange tufts are for.

Sorry about the stressful noise. : (

May 7: I edited the concluding chapter of my longfic and sent it to beta; I suppose we'll see what garonne says... Also I wrote 500 words on the new fic; total wordcount 1,000!

[regshoe]

I remember reading about that! Apparently the coloured tufts encourage parents to feed the chicks—the parent birds will feed more brightly-coloured chicks preferentially, which selects for more ornamentation.

Hooray for edits, and I'm sure it's great :) And all those words on the new fic too, well done!

[trobadora]

Checking in for the 7th.

[regshoe]

Hooray!

[philomytha]

Yay for baby coots, boo for disruptive DIY.

It’s been non-stop here today (7th), so only an alibi sentence, on a project I have been wrestling with for months. Maybe this will be the month I finally unstick it?

[regshoe]

Well done for fitting an alibi sentence into a non-stop day, and I hope it does help you to get unstuck :D

[muccamukk]

May 7: finished HA draft, and edited it for a while.

[regshoe]

Wahey, a finished draft! Very well done, and I hope the editing went well :D

[sanguinity]

May 7: Late last night I finally realised why I was stuck on my Holmes longfic. This morning I made good on that by scrapping 3K words.

The rest of the day was spent in salvaging, retooling, transcribing (longhand that I wrote last month), and writing new words, to the tune of 2400 words. It's not perfect, but I'm in much better shape than I was, and am reasonably confident that I know how to move forward from here, which I absolutely did not before. So... tentatively hopeful?

[regshoe]

Oh wow, that sounds like you've made a real breakthrough—and what a good day's work writing/sorting out all those words :D

[shadaras]

Day 7: 1.2k for an exchange fic draft

[regshoe]

Wahey, excellent wordcount!

[chanter1944]

A few sentences for day 7, which I suspect is all I've got for the day, darn it. Not zero, though.

[regshoe]

Definitely not zero!—well done for getting in those sentences :)

[phantomtomato]

May 7: Wrote 800 words this afternoon in a productive fit. Better than I expected, tbh!

[regshoe]

That is very productive indeed, well done :D

[adore]

It's getting into baby bird season here, and this morning I had a wonderful sighting—a coot (Fulica atra) sitting on its nest, with a little gaggle of adorable scruffy chick heads poking out from beneath the parent bird :D (What coot chicks look like, for reference).

Beautiful and adorable. ♡

[regshoe]

:D

[cornerofmadness]

day 7 160 words via editing and 1000001 words of test writing or at least that's how it felt. sigh

[regshoe]

Oh dear—well, good work on the test writing, and hooray for editing and new words :)

[cornerofmadness]

thanks. honestly should have added a few more zeroes into that test

[yasaman]

Day 7: 829 words for me today!

[regshoe]

Yay, good stuff :D

[kate]

Several hundred words of comments today

[regshoe]

Well done on those comments!

[carenejeans]

Day 7: A little over 300 words, plus setting up a Scrivener file for a new project, making folders and adding a bunch of notes to them. That was fun. 8-)

Yay for baby coots! And good for writing even after being blasted by noise from power tools.

[regshoe]

Aww, all the set-up of that new file does sound fun—good wishes for the new project, and well done on those words too!

[ysilme]

Aw, birdies! 😍 (Thank you for the link, I didn't know the term and have only ever seen coots travelling, I believe.) But sorry to hear about the DIY frustration! *hugs*
Day 7: nearly 1k, most of it nonfic but 129 words working on my fannish WIP, yay! I'm still having these absurd wording issues but tricked myself successfully again: doing something else, just quickly popping into the fic to work at one of the wording issues, after having taken a break for a day, worked at least for issue #1. I might need to repeat that a few time but at least I'm done with that one place and it's a RELIEF. 🤪😝🤪🥹

[regshoe]

They are some very cute birds, I'm glad you like them, and I hope you have other cute baby birds round where you are :D And that's a good trick—yay for successful out-manoeuvring of the wording issues and new words on both fic and nonfic!

[ysilme]

Thank you! And for once I'm not keen about cute baby birds close, due to our cats. ;op We're feeding birds year-round with cat-safe feeders and things in place to protect them, successfully so far, but we don't put up nesting boxes for that very reason inside our cat pen (= large fenced-in garden). Outside are two largeish "ivy" trees; apple trees covered so thickly with ivy that I'm sure baby birds are raised there, but it's safer for them to keep out of sight. There also isn't really suitable greenery for bird-breeding anywhere we go on walks to spot something, but we get lots of intense and varied birdsong, which I really love.

[regshoe]

Oh dear, I know of the perils of letting cats too near baby birds (I rescued a fledgeling blue tit from one of my housemate's cats a couple of years ago—the bird was fine in the end, but it was a dramatic adventure). I hope the baby birds in the ivy are safely hidden and getting on well, in that case :)

[ysilme]

Yay for rescuing that baby bird, and for it being successful! ♥ We never get to see any baby birds nor are the cats interested in that corner of the garden - the ivy trees are outside the fence but close enough to incite their interest - so I expect them to be save, at least from our cats. But as the trees are also on a small and very steep strip of land between our garden and the district road, foreign cats pass only very rarely due to the area being the territory of our cats; back before Findis also became a full-time "garden" cat she, her brothers and another cat of ours patrouilled that area and the old boundaries are still respeted, it seems. (They also never brought any baby birds, and nearly never a bird in the first place, perhaps once per year, and as they were faithfully bringing everything at least to the terracce we had a good idea what they were hunting). But we also always make sure to leave a lot of thick underbrush the cats can't go in so any bird on the ground can hide safely. Actually, the magpies are much more of a problem here for songbirds, particularly the blackbirds who do nest in the large cypress in front of our house (I totally forgot about that; we only know as once a fledgeling was on our roof and then in the gutter, and we could only get it safely down to the ground, not up again, but built a "safety brush heap" for it and kept the cats inside the garden (the cypress is outside the pen) after reading up on what to do. But we don't know if it was saved or one of the neighbour's cats might have got it. We had magpies nesting just one plot over in one year, and not only did they wreak total havoc with our feeding stations and dispelled all other birds, but we also had much less birds in the year afterwards. Friends from the local Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union who know our situation said it's likely the magpies not only dispersed the other birds but did likely also rob many nests.
At least the magpies didn't nest again close by, and we're back to our usual amoung of birds.

[regshoe]

That sounds like good security from cats! Aww, and good for you helping that poor fledgeling blackbird. And at least the magpies are natural predators, but it does sound like it's nicer for the songbirds without them around. I've been out for a walk this evening and saw several families of (greylag and Canada goose) goslings along the river, which is always a nice sight.

[lferion]

7 May -- 200ish words on a three word prompt piece for a friend. Pretty happy with it so far, and I know where I want to go with it, so that is a definite win.

[regshoe]

Yay, that's some excellent progress, a win indeed :D

[china_shop]

Awww, baby coots!! (Sorry about the dispiriting afternoon, though. That sounds extremely ugh!)

8th: I added about 580 words to my story draft, including finishing it, reading it through and making a few edits, then reworking the ending and sending it to beta. \o/! And I celebrated with rhubarb custard tart, nom! :-)

[regshoe]

Wahey! Congratulations on finishing the draft—definitely worthy of celebratory rhubarb custard tart :D

[silveradept]

Checking in for Day 7, I got some ideas and began writing a little of them, but I still need to get the entirety of the idea down before it tries to run away from me and hide in the depths of my brain.

[regshoe]

Getting those ideas down while they're in that stage of chaotic development in your brain can be a challenge! Well done for making a start on the writing, and best wishes for getting the rest of the idea :D

[ljm]

Day 7: Alibi sentence

[regshoe]

Well done!