The week in writing and long weekend goals

Just a quick report on my writing this week. Since I'm working on my story for the DDD anthology during the weekends, then I work on the story for the Phaze - Surge contest during the week. I didn't do much writing this week though because I first wanted to think about this thoroughly. One thing I did was to set the limit of words. I want this story to be 5K long. It can go a little over it but not by much. I'm such a plotter that I've been tempted several times to add characters and subplots. Not that this is a bad thing, but it can increase the word count to 10K easily, and honestly, I don't have the time to write such a long story. So in order to fight such temptation, I set a 5K word maximum. This also makes me stick to the plot, keep the conflict simple and straightforward. No outside conflict. If there's any conflict, it'll be internal. Then I tackled the number of characters. I love adding characters to complicate things. In this story, that's a no-no. There are going to be only one more character beside the hero and the heroine. And this character will appear in chapter 1 and that's that. So to summarize my weekly goals for the Phaze-Surge: 1) 5K word only 2) no extra characters (only one the first scene of in chapter 1) 3) internal conflict only 4) no subplots Now let's talk about the weekend. I'm gearing myself for a 3-day weekend. Woohoo! This is going to be the 3rd. weekend of the Weekend Warrior Challenge, and I'm a bit behind in my word count (about 2K behind) so I need to crank it up. Okay, I only have 2 major things to do. First, I need to buy the new heater. That's a priority. And second, I need to buy the new plants. I'm just going to Aida's Nursery Plant to buy them. No going around from one nursery plant to another. Of course, we all know how life can interfere with the best layout plans, so I'm going to spend it at the beach house. I've packed my iPaq so no Internet distractions. Goals for Weekend Warrior Challenge - Weekend 3: Write chapters 1 - 3 No. of words: 4,086 Pray for me, girls!