Weekly Accountability Post

For Monday, August 3, 2026

Welcome to the post where we check in with a report on everything we got done in the last 7 days to see how we’re measuring up to our creative goals.

This kind of accountability and social pressure is one of the best ways to increase productivity and make big dreams happen.

I’ll go first, and I invite you to post your progress in the comments.

(And yes, that is Punch’s mother in the photo.)

Screenplay

I bushwhacked through 20 more pages of my Patrick Stoodle’s Completely Awesome Army of Killer Robots screenplay (pages 54 to 73). As many of those pages as will fit are attached below.

(Substack tells me these might get cut off in some email clients, so if you want to see them all, view in a browser.)

I made major headway story-wise on this project (more details on that below) and intend to finish it this week (30 more pages) and send it to my development executive friend for a read.

I also intend to finish my pen-name screenplay this week, which is also about 30 pages from done.

Novel

I only finished two rough chapters of Nothing Civil About It: The true and epic tale of the second war between the states. Those are a mess, but they’re done and they’re attached below.

I also intend to complete this entire novel in the next week. I’m at 29K words right now, which means I’m between a half and a third of the way through. If I write 8K words per day (that’s my target), I’ll finish the novel by this weekend.

How is this possible? More on that in the “Audacious Goals” section below.

Coaching

We had a rousing Writers Room meeting this week. I also conducted two Project Everest group-coaching session, where we heard exciting progress in the novel route from Maisie Hayden, who is a book branding master, and Ian James, who finally cracked open the door to his novel.

We concluded the “Behind the Mic” course this week with two sessions. We talked about voice work and podcasting, and worked through challenges finding a comedic voice.

And we had a monthly accountability meeting this weekend, where we got a ton of inspiring news and developments from a slew of productive subscribers, notably Ken Gullette, who blew up on Substack this week, going super viral with a post. (When you subscribe, you get all these Zoom recordings, transcripts, and dazzling details.)

I met several times and reviewed a ton of material for a private coaching client who’s aiming to get accepted on the staff of a major humor publication. I’ll let you know how that goes when I have the results.

Family Responsibilities

The reason I only wrote two chapters and 20 screenplay pages is that virtually every day in the past week was swallowed by huge family responsibilities: one major life transition and one big adventure—featuring two different family members.

I’ll give you the lowdown below.

Next Week’s Audacious Goals

Why do I think I can write half to two-thirds of a novel plus complete two screenplays in one week? How is this humanly possible? (Without doing any AI writing, of course, which I hate.)

I’ll give you the thrilling answer to that question below.

Get in on this one!