Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to write much this week, but it was still a productive week.

Hubby and I tackled the side yard and back yard and turned it into a nice little play area for the Boyo. We chopped down some of the bushes, and leveled out the ground using mulch, dirt, and a whole bunch of aquarium rocks that the previous owners lined a path with. We then covered it with some astro turf (which is SO much nicer than the astro turf that my cousins and I grew up with) and moved Boyo’s basketball hoop and his pool out there for him to play with. We also plan on getting him a slide, and maybe a little pup tent that we can turn into a sand box for him.

Boyo absolutely loves it. Especially the stairs going from the porch down to his yard. Unfortunately, the carpet that covers the stairs is worn out and not the safest. Boyo has almost fallen down them twice now. So we’ll be buying a baby gate so we can block the stairs off when we’re out there.

We also replaced the wiring and the vanity light in the bathroom. Now we just need to repaint the walls since the paint is all chipped and cracking from pulling off the wall panels (a part of me is tempted to buy some of those peel and stick tile backsplashes to hide the mess). It’s so strange to have another light in that room again. I’ve gotten so used to just using the ceiling light that I keep forgetting that there’s one over the vanity again.

And this week, we’ll be replacing the hardware on the vanity. I meant to do that on Monday and Tuesday, but when the old owners were prepping the house to sell, they decided to paint over everything – including the hardware, and, we just realized, the bath tub surrounds – and its made pulling off the hardware damn near impossible. I’ve even tried scratching the paint off of the screws to see if that will help, and, nope. The screws won’t budge.

So I’m leaving that for Hubby to tackle.

Despite being so busy I did get some things for The Descendants figured out. I was struggling with what to do with it again, and I was considering cutting out the whole Pompeii storyline among other things for the millionth time. Talking with friends didn’t help much, until one friend, Jewel, suggested I send her the outline for it. So I dug out the outline only to realize that it was only halfway done. I promised her I would finish it before I sent it, and in doing so, I realized that the story wasn’t the problem – I was.

I had been too busy listening to friend’s – one specific friend actually- opinions and not listening to my characters, and things had festered into the worst case of writers block I’ve ever experienced. Don’t get me wrong, I had ideas for the story, I was just too concerned about what other people thought to actually do anything with them. Finishing that outline showed me the error of my ways. It also taught me that there’s nothing wrong with being a plotter – I’ve been a pantser for most of my stories – because if you get stuck, you can always refer to the outline to show you were to go.

Unfortunately, it means that I will have to make some tweaks to The Descendants to get it back on track, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to use most of what I already have with some minor editing.

In addition to that, I also figured out the origin story for a character who shows up in book two, and a motive for why he is where he is. So that was nice, especially as this was something that has been bothering me for a while now.

Anywho, it’s Wednesday (well, technically Thursday since I started writing this post so late…) so it’s time for another WIPpet Snippet. Unfortunately I can’t share anything from The Descendants until I get what I have cleaned up. I also can’t share the aformentioned character’s origin story, because that would just be spoiling things. But I do have something I wrote a couple of weeks ago based off a picture Jewel sent to me.

Since today is (was) the 8th, here are two paragraphs from that little snippet (6-8=2). To set the scene up, a girl is walking down a main street in a small town when she notices a good looking guy checking out an antique store – and then she notices something strange about him.

His forearm was one solid black tattoo.

Even though she knew it was rude to stare, she found herself gawking. Who in their right mind would get a solid black tattoo. A regular tattoo was painful enough, but a solid black mass… she shuddered at the thought of being stuck in a chair for hours and hours as the tattoo gun ran over her skin painting row after endless row. Then as he drew closer, she noticed that it wasn’t completely black like she had originally thought it was. There were patches of white here and there in the sea of darkness. For a minute, she thought that perhaps he had opted to black out the names of his ex-lovers – for a guy as hot as he was probably had quite a list – but as he passed her she noticed that there were designs. One appeared to be a compass with far too many points. Another looked like the face of a clock, but it dissolved into the pale face of a skull.

I may expand upon this snippet later. It works really well with another idea I had recently, but there just isn’t enough hours in the day, so it’ll have to wait for now!

To read more WIPpet Wednesday posts, go here.