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Did You write? 04-07-08 This note is an attempt to embarrass myself and the rest of you, into writing each week. The idea is to give you are short term goal to aim for, in this case, a once a week report. The hope is that you will feel embarrassed that you did not report writing last week and try harder to write for the next week report. I am pretty loose on what can be considered writing. Much of it is up to you. It is definitely any new writing. It is also any editing, including editing someone else's work. It is poetry, prose, articles. It can be world building as long as you write something down (you define how much). Blogging counts as does E-mails, though they should be long and best ABOUT writing or it would be pushing the definitions a bit much.
I am excited. I did write this week!!! It has been a while. It is not really new, but I can explain. Late last year, I was writing a Waxy Dragon story, and then my laptop's fan died. I have not had the money to repair it. I lost access to that story, along with two others that were in process. My writing partner and I were discussing the world of my Waxy dragon and she mentioned a different tact of how this story would have been handled in a portion of it. It had some humor and interest in it. When my opportunity to write came up this weekend, I broke down and recreated the story I had, making some changes I thought of over time. It is a lot lighter in mood than the original one. The words flew out of the keyboard and onto screen and was fun to write. I did not keep track of how long I wrote, but I ended the session with the story at page 5 with 2528 words. That was fun. What I like to do is to add the page and word count at the end of my work, and this note gives it special meaning in that I can see how much I have added each week. I do have an admission to make. My word and page count is the ONLY thing on page five. I am sticking to the page count, though. five pages sounds so much better than four pages. In my story, The Bubblehead character is taking Waxy Dragon and her animated teddy bears with him to a nursing home for magic users. I got them to the computer operated portal, about to step through, when I stopped. In my next writing session, I will make a few quick corrections in what I have, nothing drastic, and then forge onward from here.
I am doing well on the story ideas. I have had a couple recent ideas that were rather flat. When you do 365 presentations each year, It is hard to get all of them perfect. There are some I am proud of. I still have no clue where the concepts come from, but I am happy when I get extra. At one point this week, I had like two ideas left in my fresh idea stack. I then came up with a bunch of extra. Including tonight's post, I have six ideas in my fresh idea stack. I considered sorting through my TO BE POSTED stack and pick out ten ideas, but have not had to do so. it remains untouched.
I have always been the kind of person who is more than willing to tell what I know, or what I think I know. Back when Prodigy Classic existed, which shut down back in 2000, I was involved in the model railroad board. I would read articles in a magazine, then post on line what I thought I knew. Since the notes faded away after about a month, I repeated my posts, improving on them over time. I eventually ended up with 85 notes on model railroading that I posted regularly. On the board, I joked that half the people on the board, knew twice as much about model railroading as I did, but because I could talk about it, I became a guru on the subject. I moderated the model railroading forum on the railroad board on Prodigy Internet for several years. My brother and I, after prodigy internet disappeared, really got into model railroading. I have a permanent layout in my house. It makes a great shelf for stuff...... <G> My brother used to come and visit once a week and we would have operating sessions where we would run trains, or work on the layout and do a lot of talking. He got busy in his own business and could no longer come by. My railroad layout went fallow. For me, model railroading is a hobby that I can be very excited about if I am involved, or I can utterly forget about it if I am not involved. Lat month and this month, a local model railroad club and museum had open houses, where the public could see what they had. Some memories about what my brother and I used to do came to mind. I could not remember some of the details though. It had been a couple years. The second visit brought to mind all sorts of details and more information I never thought of on the previous visit. It sparked a bit of excitement again. I started writing a note on model railroading to post tonight, and got so sidetracked from what I was after, as I was trying to tell everything I knew. I had to put the note away and get to work on other things such as this note.
On the woodworking front, I had one of those "break it" weekends, where I broke or tried to break, several projects I worked on. I am making a bird house and was hollowing it out. five times, the boring tool I was using caught on the wood and ripped the vase out of the chuck holding it on the lathe, and sent it flying. After five attempts, without it breaking, I decided that was enough. This was the second attempt at this part of the bird house. The garbage man will take away my first attempt. I am making some COWBOY BOOT earrings. They are pretty good so far, but I have yet to decorate them. I sold a couple at the art show and decided to make more of them.
To use the above in a story idea, He is retired, had pretty much lost interest in just about anything. in his younger years, he was among the best, but now he is barely in the records. One day, he visits a show and sees some of the equipment like what he used to use. He gets into a conversation with someone and he ends up passing on a bit of his knowledge. back home, he has that spark of interest. A bit of time passes and he visits another similar show. He finds himself in deep discussions with many people and they are impressed with what he knows. He is enticed into trying his skills. Very quickly all those little tricks and techniques he knew, comes back to his memory. He is drawn back into the interest and makes a new name for himself in it. I would have it, though, where he is centuries old and this was something he was involved in during the early years. It could be martial arts, or a craft or hobby. It might be dancing or a Renaissance type of thing where he may have actually lived in the real time it was emulating.
AS to the question of the day I can honestly say that Yes, I did write.
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This past week I've started my new novel after doing a lot of outlining. I'm pleased to say that over the past week, I've written three chapters, rounding out at over three thousand words overall. About the entire first half of the story is outlined, with a few endings in sight, depending on which way I feel the characters would take things.
In addition, I've started the process of editing my last novel and getting it into a publicly-viewable format.
I, too, can honestly say that I wrote, and in what is vast quantity for me!
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Yes, I wrote. I didn't finish my story #6 last week. Too much "life" interfered so today I picked up my shovel and headed to the mine again -- returned to work. John just parachuted out of a planetary lander into the untrackable forest onworld. Lots to work out tomorrow. At the climax I think. I think the rest of this week I will take a break and just root about in my mental cellars for story ideas to help write those last 6 stories for this project.
Posts: 1580 | Registered: Dec 2005
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After a slow week, I was on fire yesterday and today. Lots of projects though. I wish I could just focus on one thing at a time.
Posts: 1888 | Registered: Jan 2008
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Considering most days I can't even find time to breathe, I've written seven thousand words of my new WoTF story this week, most of it over the weekend.
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Yes I wrote, I think. Trying to stay focus on editing though, but sometimes a scene for next novel calls and has to be written.
Posts: 1168 | Registered: Mar 2008
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I had a pretty good week. For some reason, I couldn't get anything going last Wednesday---but every day after was fine. So fine that on a couple of days, I doubled up for a thousand words in two writing sessions instead of my usual five hundred words in one.
Not that it's without problems. Yesterday, while I was writing, a whole new character wandered up into the narrative. She's not in any of my outlines or notes---but she seems to have a definite personality and work in what's written so far. I'll have to see how things go before I decide whether to keep her...but if this is a new direction, I don't mind...
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Yes. I wrote 6000 new words to my novel. I specify new because I had been stuck in a scene that I couldn't write my way out of so I kept going back and tweeking older chapters to fit what my characters had gone and done. What I finally did do was start writing out of sequence. I wrote scenes from the future so to speak. It liberated me and helped to clear up some questions I had regarding the plot outcomes. This is not the way I have written in the past so I guess I learned something new.
Posts: 340 | Registered: Jan 2008
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