Project 30 Challenge day 4

13 Sep, 2026

See the intro post

Progress report

Today I crossed the 1k mark with prose, and my fast-draft writer brain was so disappointed that it took me 4 days. When I had considerably more free time, energy, and brain-space, I was averaging closer to 2k a day. And I miss those days, a lot. It is easier to stay in the flow of a project when I’m moving that fast through it.

But, I can’t do those kind of numbers anymore, and I have to accept that reality, so I don’t put myself down for being so slow compared to my past self. Instead, I just accept that even small amounts of progress is still progress.

It’s still hard, though.

Factoid

Today Roselia revealed to me that she’s not as young as I thought. The first few hundred words she was reading like a novice, like someone new to the ship and to stars outside the confines of an atmosphere, but it turns out she’s closer to my own mid-thirties age and that she’s been on the ship for long enough to know how things work. Even just in this first thousand words, she has shown wide-eyed wonder but also clear-headed thinking in an emergency.

All of this is a good sign. Because I write organically and discover character as I go, sometimes the characters that arrive on the page are not the characters I want to write about. I’ve had quite a few stories die on the vine because the character was either not interesting to write about, or not fun to write about, for various reasons. But so far, I like Roselia, and I think I will continue to like her as I write her story.

Inspiration – Psalm 102

About a month ago I saw a copy of the King James Bible on the free cart at my local library. This wasn’t just any ordinary copy, though. As the subtitle on the cover says, this copy was “Designed to be read as living literature”. There are no verse breaks, no footnotes, and things are broken up by story or poem rather than by chapter. As someone who has studied literature, and who is religious, I couldn’t pass it up. Especially since a good portion of the book is written as poetry, and I have come to enjoy poetry over the years.

I haven’t read much of the book itself, as it is a massive doorstopper at 1250 pages, but I was reading through the psalms as part of my study for church this past Sunday when I read Psalm 102. This psalm, called “Hear My Prayer” in this literature Bible, is a beautiful poem from the perspective of a person crying out in the depths of depravation, feeling their mortality and the frailty of their human body, and then praising God for His power and His unchanging nature.

I was already starting to think about my story when I read this, and it struck me as timely. With story structure in mind, this scripture poem reads like the dark night of the soul moment, where a protagonist has lost everything and must dig deep to find the answers needed to get back up and finish the fight (metaphorically or otherwise). The psalmist says, “Hide not they face from me / in the day when I am in trouble…” (Bates and Allison, 625¹), which is such a perfect sentiment for that dark night moment in a story like this.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I write organically, starting from the beginning and moving forward without jumping around. Sometimes this is called “pantsing”, but I’m not fond of that term because I’m not actually writing by the seat of my pants, I’m following the natural, organic development of characters while utilizing a solid, researched background in story structure to keep things moving in the right direction. So even though I don’t start out with an outline or a plot written out, I do have some idea of where I’m going and what things I want to happen, especially for the ending.

It’s not entirely solid yet, but Psalm 102 has given me a lot to mull over about the shape of the 75% mark.

And perhaps some quotes for a possible epigraph.

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