Weekly Update Feb 19-Mar 17

This weekly update is really more of a monthly update. As you can read about in the Writing 365 section, I took a slight detour to become involved with a special writing situation. This resulted in a suspension of my usual writing tasks, including blog posts. Fortunately, I try to stay 1-2 months ahead in writing posts, so this detour did not result in many missed posts (except weekly updates), but my list of scheduled posts has diminished, and I must now get back on track!

Blog Posts

A reality show with real consequences
The quadrennial race for President of the United States is a reality show, but with real consequences for the world.

Massive list of story prompts, Part 2
This is the second post of lists of story prompts. Find a category and pick a work. Take a few minutes to recall a memory centered around the word. Write a story about what you remember or an incident you experienced.

So you think you can write
Harlequin, the premier publisher of romance novels, provides several resources for authors as well as submission guidelines for each category of romance.

Presentation rehab tip 2: write the purpose
This is Tip 2 of several tips to create presentations and deliver them more effectively. This tip today is to write down the purpose of your presentation.

Combine multiple Excel worksheets into one
In this post I share about a project where I needed to combine multiple Excel worksheets into one using Visual Basic coding. The code combined 66 worksheets into 1 containing the entire King James Version of the Bible.

Today
Does it matter how you view a situation?

Tales of a dog named Sex (Dear Abby column)
This is a hilarious story about what happens when a dog has a peculiar name, "Sex."

Presentation rehab tip 3: don't use a script
When presenting, avoid using a script or reading the text displayed on the slides.

Writing 365

Since the beginning of 2016, I have been attempting to write a minimum of 1,000 words every day in the categories of a personal journal, daily devotional, e-books, and blog posts. For the most part, as I have previous reported in weekly updates, I have been able to remain on track.

In February one of my daughter's teachers and I had a conversation about old religious texts. Mr. C told me about a book written in the 1600s that has never been published since. As it is in the public domain, I located a PDF copy of scanned microfilm and began the process of converting the book into a modern publication. The first step in this effort was to type the text into an electronic form. I paused my regular writing (except the daily journal) to focus on typing in the words from this 400-year old book. Because this special project is still writing related, I counted the number of words I typed each day.

As a result, by word counts for the last three weeks have been considerably higher than previously. I am happy to say that the book is now in an electronic form. I now have moved on to other aspects of the book, which I will write about in future blog posts.

Bible Project

The Bible writing project, where I am writing out the entire Bible, was also largely suspended while I focused on the special project. I am currently working in the book of Judges, chapter, where Samson's girlfriend is pestering Samson into revealing the true source of his Hulk-like strength. If all goes as planned, I should be done with Judges by the end of March.