Each week I offer a place to talk about what is going on in your life. As a side advantage, I also give you a chance to talk about your writing. The hope is that you will realize with your post that you did not write or did not meet your writing goals this week and will strive to open your work in progress the following week so you can report that you corrected your previous bad habit. I have had many times where the guilt of not writing, had forced me to write something the following week. That is what I am hoping for, for the rest of you.
How much writing is not important. One word, ten thousand words, it does not matter, as long as you write. We all have had times where we had to zap entire sections of text in order to correct a problem so while you may have typed vast amounts of words, your actual word count was not impressive.
As to what is writing, we all know that new writing is writing. Editing is also writing, even if it is the work of others. Critiquing is also writing. Also as writing is Technical writing, writing assignments, articles, blogging, character or world creation. Even E-mails can be writing if they are wordy and pertain to writing or stories. If you have to ask if it is writing, The answer is yes.
For me, I have been writing. I posted a story idea early last month and it kept nagging at me I decided it had to be developed a little farther. then I found I needed to do a little more on it. now I am trying to write it out completely as a series of short stories. It is not the same story that seeded the concept, because of practical necessities of story telling. The SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has pulled on me and I have not touched my Waxy story all week because this one is writing itself for me. Last week I started with the new scenes I wrote about it, then pulled in the story idea into the text for reference. I have since pulled the story idea back out because it was no longer valid, having been rewritten, and the scene I wrote originally, is about to go away too. I have written a lot more than my 3745 words this week would show. I went from page 4 to page 14 for a total of 5304 words. My writing is crap right now, but it is sure fun getting it on paper. It is exciting.
On the story idea front, the ideas are barely coming in. I am coming up with about an idea a day. I have a meeting this week and will miss a day. With the two ideas I am posting today, I have 34 ideas in the compost pile. disappointing to say the least. Luckily, I have had some fairly good ideas to work with. Even the bad new ideas were not all that bad. yes, I am 34 ideas ahead of the days in the compost pile, but I have had enough bad weeks of not having something new and there are enough poor ideas in there to not want to test the stack too far.
I have a lot of hobby projects going on. I had picked up a whole bunch of yarn. I also got a bunch of unfinished projects, namely granny squares. some granny squares are a foot across while others are as small as four inches across. I also made a few of my own. I decided to make all the existing granny squares the same size and then make more, using up my yarn stash, and come up with a blanket. At least that is the plan. I am close to finishing a crochet yarn bag I am making using bits and pieces of yarn (an odd ball). I figured out to add rods on the top edge of the long side to give it shape. I made buttons for it and then a button loop and have all that attached. The handle is all I have to do to call it finished and I am less than half way on that at minimum. I may make double the size when I get to the end and fold it in half for strength. will see. I am applying varnish to a face vase I finished carving last week. It is looking good. I have several goblets and other pieces that are close to being finished. This week, I realized that some big slabs of wood I have, had a dragon inside it. I examined them carefully and figured out where the dragon was. I separated that from the rest of the slab and drew some lines. Now I just have to remove the excess wood to free the dragon from the prison it is in.
Using the above for a story idea, a baby dragon got lost from the nest. got really tired so it climbed into a fold in a tree to rest and hide while it slept. A magician who worked for a logging company came by and cast a spell on the trees to make them grow big and thick they grew rapidly over night. The problem is that anything inside the wood got trapped. it did not kill them, but they were frozen in place. Years later, the logging company harvested the trees in that section. In the milling process to make boards and stuff, most creatures were sliced up. they simply died, with no sign they were in there as they were essentially made of wood. The loggers would not have cared even if they knew about it. An old wood carver is searching the logged area for usable chunks and cuttings. He found a big thick slab of wood that was rather interesting. He got that into his wagon with it buried under branches and short logs. Several months later, he looks at the piece of wood and keeps coming back to it. There is something interesting about it. He senses something is inside. He removes the part that contains what is interesting and then starts chopping away the excess wood. As he gets closer, the form becomes apparent. Following the form he sees, he removes all the excess wood even from beneath the scales. he now has a realistic baby dragon sitting on his table. For some reason, he is sitting up as the moon rises. the moonlight lands on the carving. the carving starts to move, and becomes the baby dragon again. He does not know if it will become wood when daylight comes. whether he has a baby dragon or a excellent carving, he will be the talk of the town.
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Another pretty slow week for me. Did a little on my fanfiction, with mixed results, and I'm getting things organized for another wave of submissions.
All in all maybe 5k words total, so yes, I did write.
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Wednesday and Thursday were fine, writing wise...Friday being one of my "busy days"...then, Saturday, just as I was sitting down to write, I got hit by some bowel-stomach-bowel distress thing, something that lingered in me till Monday morning, and Monday being a "busy day," too.
Too bad, too...I'd reached an interesting scene of backfill information, where two characters argued about the facts and the positions taken. Ah, well, there's still later today and tomorrow...
(I can chart my week with predictability. I work nights...Tuesdays and Wednesdays I'm off from work...Tuesdays I shop but Wednesdays I'm usually free...Thursday I have the morning to myself before I turn in...Friday I shop...Saturday the same as Thursday...Sunday I cook...Monday I drop in and unwind from the week in my parents' Jaccuzzi...then it starts all over again...)
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yep. Pretty pleased with the weekend writing, nearly 5,000 words. But this week is crushing me at work 12 hour days this week, but should be last week of that many hours until February, but still manic hours, no time to breathe.
Posts: 1168 | Registered: Mar 2008
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Only new writing is working on The Premises mini contest 25 to 50 word story without the letter e. Of course I made it harder on myself by forgetting it was to fifty. But now I can add a couple of words to make it better. Thought about seeing if anyone would want to read it to make sure it is a story but the opening would be only one to two lines instead of 13.
Did a few crits, an E-mail or three. Some posts here and on Google plus.
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This has been one of the more inconsistent weeks of writing I've gone through in a while, where my uneven daily word counts averaged just short of 700 new words a day. I'd like to blame my WotF exploits, but I submitted that story to the group six days ago. As it turns out, the true reason for my odd output was because I spent a lot of time editing the first story of my young adult series. Oh...and I'm also threatening to being back a SF series I thought I shelved once and for all a long time ago.
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I've never done this before, but I guess this is a good thread to be able to tell people what I've been up to, because I think I'm starting to get on the nerves of the people I talk to about my story in real life, and you guys can skim or skip this post.
The thing is, right now I'm stuck at home with my two little girls (almost 4 and 15 months) and my husband has been working 10-14 hour days at his road construction job only to come home and collapse into bed. Which is fine, I would; but I feel like I haven't seen another adult in four days, and phone calls can only go so far. If my posts seem frequent and verbose, I hope you can forgive me. I have a lot of extra words, these days.
At the beginning of the year, I made a goal to have something, anything, submitted (not accepted, necessarily) for publication by December 31. I have a few projects right now. The main one is a YA novel with the working title "Sworn." It's hovering around 94,000 words and is under it's umpteenth revision, for some parts, and second or third for others. I read over the whole thing for the first time last week. It has major pacing flaws, but with a little clipping and a few new scenes I think I can resolve them. Part of the problem is that back when I wrote the first draft, I hadn't really filled in the world I was writing. I had my basic plot, but the details about the background and shared experience of most of the characters was relatively blank (except, of course, for the events directly leading up to the story). Sometimes I still feel like it's too simple, because I want to write something great. But, being a YA adventure/romance, it is what it is. Ultimately, I hope to keep it under 100,000 words and start submitting sometime in September. I've worked on "Sworn" a lot this week.
The other large project I'm working on I started back in 2008. It was my first attempt at a novel, and really, my first attempt at writing anything that wasn't an academic paper. It stalled out at 47,000 words, but in the last few weeks, when I'm tired of working on "Sworn," I'll think about the story. I've gotten some ideas I'm hoping will revive it.
Also, I really want to write a short story and submit it to Intergalactic Medicine Show, but I have no brilliant ideas. Well, I have one idea I think is cool, but it refuses to become more than that. If I can manage to get Sworn finished, I'll focus on this next. I've never written a short story (not since high school English, anyway), so I'm still blundering my way around how it's done.
More casually, I've also done a few crits and some blog posts, the blogs mostly to put off working on my story... kind of like this post...
First: sounds good with the writing especially with all of those distractions. But do watch the upteenth revisions even on just certain sections. Too many revisions can be the same as too many cooks.
As to the rest, personally I think it's fine as long as you don't use baby talk.
Someone said they did that, when they finally got to spend some time with adults.
But I think there are some here that can relate to you.
[This message has been edited by LDWriter2 (edited August 20, 2011).]
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Thanks, I am trying to watch the revisions. Since I've never gotten this far on a manuscript, I'm still learning what's good to do and not so good to do, and I discovered that one. It really does kill your writing.
Ha, ha, as I've been trying to get through this manuscript, my girls have been watching a lot of kids' shows on Netflix (don't worry, I balance it with plenty of trips to the park/pool/friends' houses to make it up to them). Blues Clues gives me a few unoccupied minutes every now and then.
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