Weekly Accountability Post

For Monday, August 10, 2026

This is the weekly post where we show up with all the work we got done in the week.

You can join and use social pressure to be more productive. It really works!

Here’s what I got done:

My goal for the week, which I set in the August 3 post, was to finish the rough draft of my novel and finish the mid-stage revision drafts of two screenplays.

I cleared my schedule and was totally alone all week, which was wonderful. But how did I do?

Novel

I wrote a ton of chapters for Nothing Civil About It, my second-civil-war novel, by far my most ever in a week. I’m not sure how many exactly. Maybe 20, since I wrote well over 20K words, sprinting to the finish.

As many of this absurd quantity of chapters as will fit is below. (If you can’t see them all in your email, open this post in the Substack app (link above) or in your browser.)

Technically, I didn’t finish the rough draft of the book, but I feel good about my progress. I got burned out about a dozen chapters from the end. Instead of burning through with terrible vomit drafts of each chapter, I wrote detailed outlines and plan to bang them out this week.

So, for next week, my goal for the novel is to have what Stephen King calls “clean” pages for the whole book (meaning they’re better than a vomit draft—they’re what I call a “rough draft”) and ready for a first-pass edit.

Screenplays

I finished my Patrick Stoodle’s Completely Awesome Army of Killer Robots screenplay—40 pages—and sent it off to my development executive friend for notes yesterday.

As many of those pages as will fit are below.

Sadly, I didn’t finish the other screenplay (a pen-name script about mind-reading teens), but I mapped out the remaining scenes. My goal for next week is to finish it. I only have about 20 pages left.

Your Turn

What did you get done this week? Let us know in the comments. That’s how this works.