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Did You Write? 08-19-08 . This is a note to prompt you into writing. The idea is to have a place to post the results of the week's activities, or lack of activities. The hope is that you will see the deadline is coming up and you will rush to write something, anything, to report that you actually worked. I consider writing, any new writing, of course. I also consider editing, even if it is someone else's writing, as writing. Poetry, blogs, articles, newsletters, E-mail if it is about writing and is quite wordy. There are others, and it really depends on whether YOU consider it writing.
I was on vacation for two weeks, visiting my writing partner. I have to say that we talked too much to do any real writing. I did do some. I wrote only two story ideas in the 19 days so far, which is not good, but that is how vacations are. I think I reported that I had started the Waxy story (Waxy is a cat sized baby dragon) about her visiting my writing partner the last time (I have not looked to verify) and had two pages already written with 1171 words. I rewrote a big block of the airport scene based on the actual air port layout, and then continued writing. I now have her nearly on the plane on page 6 with 2554 words. That is a 1383 words in two weeks. That is not good, but we plotted out nearly the entire series of stories based on our vacation. It will be at least 14 stories and could expand into twice that much. There will be three of us writing the stories so there could be more. My writing partner has a common friend who is great at editing and writes pretty good living nearby and we spent a whole lot of time together. And he will be involved in writing the stories. It was a shock to find how closely my writing partner and I clicked. We were exchanging puns, story ideas, jokes. We were almost of exactly the same mind. Now I know why our writing got along so well together.
I had cut my finger on the 12th of July and have had a cast or brace on my hand since. Typing one handed is a royal pain to a touch typist. Yesterday, I got permission to remove the brace to type, but will wear the brace until tomorrow. The end digit is not moving as much as it is supposed to. Of course the rest of the finger does not move much yet either. Hopefully, I will get full movement in the finger when therapy is done.
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I live by the old 3 hour minimum. Its normally broken up, but that's what my life calls for right now.
Writing a story is much like reading it. If you pick up a book and get really into it, you will read at any given opportunity. However, if you put your book down for a couple of days, you aren't as anxious to jump back into the story, you kinda have to work into it and warm back up to it. Writing is the same.
During Editing, when I'm just doing revisions, I tend to blog. This place is better, because the topics are moving in the direction of my ultimate goal.
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About 6 thousand words in the past day on one story alone, so I'm fairly pleased. Aside from that, I've been working on several short stories, editing them to the point where they're ready for submission. I've also started a few draft letters to potential publishers.
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Not a single word. Just when I thought I was finally caught up with my life and was going to have time to write again, my husband finally decided to buy paint for all our walls. I'm struggling with indecision. Do I write this week, like I thought I was going to? Or do I give in the to impulse to slather my walls with color after all these long months instead of waiting for the weekend when he can help and two of us could get it done in half the time?
Probably I'll write. Probably. Edging doesn't take that much time really. Does it?
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Yes. I've had to drop my daily minimum down to 200 words, but I'm writing again. Slow and painful. So many typos from my fingers twitching and hitting the wrong keys.
I'm pushing through CHINA STATION. Today I plan a long walk to come up with the answer to the big question of what's killing people on China Station. My pov knows the answer. I'm just trying to get him to tell me!
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Yes, last week I wrote about 2,000 words, all for one story. I'm revising the outline as I write, which I'll cite as the reason I fell about 1,000 short of my weekly goal.
From the Good News Department, when I updated my writing log earlier today, I learned I wrote almost 25,000 for novels and short stories in the past eight weeks. That’s more than I expected, so I’m pleased.
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Well, since the last "did you write?" post, I worked on my story for a couple of days, got dreadfully sick and dreadfully exhausted (didn't miss work but did miss writing), finished my story in one burst right after that, then...nothing. Haven't done any writing in two weeks, probably won't do any writing today...may do some writing tomorrow, but I'll have to see.
My plan is to take up the second draft of a previously-finished story where I left it, and go from there. But I didn't plan on interrupting work on it for a new story in the first place.
quote:When you review your drafts, how many pages do you still want to keep?
Usually most of them, though they tend to change form pretty radically... normally by adding more though. The big exception to this is my last novel where I went six chapters deep into one storyline arch, realized it was not working, then hacked and slashed all six chapters. That was painful.
I have been told that I have a very "flowery" sense of description, though, so don't read too much into those six thousand words. A lot of it is probably "fluff".
quote:My inner editor still babbles every time I write. I’m guessing you can switch that voice off and just go with the flow.
Kinda have to before the perfectionist mentality takes over and starts screaming. My thought is just to get as much down on paper as I can and sort the ideas out later on. I try not to write until I have a full scene fleshed out in my mind. Until then I'll scribble in a little journal that I keep with me, mostly in outline form. If fate is kind to me, those outlines in the journal translate into some variation of a story later on.
quote:Rhaythe, you’re amazing.
Sorry. It just was worth quoting. I'll turn my ego off now.
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Addendum: I came to a decision just this morning, that I'd wandered up a wrong path in the last third of my story and need to replot and rewrite, probably at greater length. Something about it bothered me all along, but it wasn't until this morning that I definitely decided to rewrite.
So I may be doing that when I actually do some writing...copy and paste the first third, insert a couple of bits here and there, then start at the abbreviated end and write on from there...
Of course now I'm starting to think I'm cursed, as my last two finished-in-draft stories came in over twenty thousand words and it looks like this one will, too...have I forgotten how to write small?
quote:as my last two finished-in-draft stories came in over twenty thousand words and it looks like this one will, too...have I forgotten how to write small?
How long are you aiming for? I never considered twenty thousand words that much, unless you're aiming for short stories.
Posts: 487 | Registered: Mar 2008
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Yep, I did! Not every day and not as much as last week. I had a week at work where I could have sworn I worked in Bizarroworld. I did get in about 1K words this week. Leslie Posts: 391 | Registered: Jul 2008
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It's less a matter of what I was aiming for than being startled at suddenly writing much longer stories.
From about 2000 to 2006, after finishing my last novel, the peak of my word length for finished stories was just over ten thousand words, and most of what I wrote was much shorter. (Most of the ones at ten thousand or so were Internet Fan Fiction, and in an adapted telescript format---special cases, all.) Usually I hit between three thousand and five thousand words.
Then in 2006 a novel springs out of my mind unbidden, goes on and stalls out at one hundred thousand words---and along the way two other stories finish in draft at over twenty thousand words.
They don't seem to have much more than what I was writing at shorter length---the one I finished and sent to market had only six characters, which hardly seemed enough. (Might as well name it, since I'm not planning more submissions: "The Laminants," up on my website since late June.)
Besides that, although I'm less interested these days in selling my work, I was still planning on submitting some, just for the thrill of it, and just on the possibility of sales. They always used to say shorter works by newer writers have a better chance. What luck would I have if I'm doing inferior work at a higher word volume?
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