December 15, 2008 Did You Write? . Fess Up, Be truthful, Did You Write at any time this week? This note is to prompt you to try to get some writing done. You see this note coming up and hopefully you will get your act together and write something, just about anything, just so you can say you wrote. The nice thing is that you can do is to hold off a few days to get around to write, then report in. I have to have my writing done by the time I post this note. What you can call writing is, Any new writing, of course. That is a given. Editing, even if it is someone else's, is writing. I consider poetry as writing. Blogging, technical articles, newsletters, writing assignments, are also writing. World building, as long as something gets on paper, is also writing. E-mails, as long as they are wordy and involve writing, can also be looked on as writing. Just about anything else you might consider as writing, can be writing. You make the final decision as what you report as writing.
AS for me, I realized when I started this, that I did not do any writing. I mainly got side tracked. My story ideas are taking a bit longer to write than I would like, not all because of my hand. I have started painting my own Christmas cards. I had a start on a bunch, and then found I did it all wrong. I painted over the entire "screen" and am now doing a different design. I am also painting some gift packages, adding my own decorations. I have to get my story ideas out, notes like this, and gather things for gifting together. I have dozens of projects to do and I am a PRO-crastinator, I am not an amateur. I am also going to different doctors and therapists and they can sometimes dig into my work time. I might be able to get some writing done this next week, but doubt it.
I am getting about as many story ideas as I am posting. I am surprised about that, and kind of happy. I really don't want to write a few of the notes in my working stack which now has 21 story ideas. I am missing a stack of story ideas. I need to do some digging into some piles where stuff got left. Several of those ideas were really good. They disappeared while unloading from one thing, and moving things for another. I have to start at one corner of the house and work my way to the other, looking at everything that might be those story ideas. I am not sure when I will get to doing that. I should as other things also would be solved with that.
AS to the question of the day I have to admit that I did not write.
DID YOU WRITE?
Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :
Yes, and I'm not done yet.
Posted by LAJD (Member # 8070) on :
Yes, I did. Both new work and editing. I wrote every day last week except Saturday (I was sick).
I track this now with a neato little webapp called Dont break the Chain that I have on my google hompage:
You score a colored square on a rolling month calendar for each day you do something. The goal is to make your month solid color. Its neat, I track new work, editing, any writing, exercising (very un-colored), writing on my blog (completely white) and BizDev for my consulting business.
So now each week, when you post I can look at tell exactly what I have done! I so love metrics.
Leslie
Posted by BenM (Member # 8329) on :
No! Well, not on the 15th. On the 14th I finally finished the first draft of my first novel-length project, cramming in the last 6K over the weekend. It's a good feeling; I typed the last couple of paragraphs with a big smile (it has a vaguely sappy ending), and at a meagre 71K it's still probably longer than the sum of all my story writing thus far. I certainly think I learned more from it than any previous project.
Now it gets buried in soft peat for a couple of months so I can review it with fresh eyes before the editing begins. I'm allowing myself time to procrastinate for a few days before starting the next project
Posted by satate (Member # 8082) on :
Not enough. I wrote a tiny bit of new work and did some editing and crits.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
Well, as mentioned the last time around, I was busy Wednesday-Thursday-Friday, and didn't get anything done then. But Saturday-Sunday I managed five hundred words a day. (Still revision only.) Monday, though, I meant to write up something before I went to bed...but fell asleep in my living room chair and was so tired that when I woke up I just went straight to bed.
Today, I should be able to squeeze something out. I'm about two thousand words away from the end of this draft...then was going to put a hold on everything till post-Christmas, writing only when I had some time heavy on my hands.
Posted by tempest (Member # 8242) on :
Yes, but not as much as I should have or would have liked to... Oh well, shoulda, coulda, woulda...... I'm finishing up a short story and started some new poetry.
Posted by steffenwolf (Member # 8250) on :
Very slowly. Still working on my most recent tale as I have been for a while. I think I finally have a solid idea where to go with it now, but I still have to sit and click out the words!
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
Actually, today proved to be another washout. A lot of my day was taken up with a new washer---shopping for, buying, waiting for delivery, installation, and doing a few loads to see how it worked. (It runs, but does it work? I had the previous one for just under twenty years and I knew its pecularities. Can I make this one do what I want?) Wore me out for today. I was planning on getting it post-Christmas, but decided it was too much trouble to wait.
But now that's over and done, and I should have a little free time tomorrow to do some writing.
Posted by sjsampson (Member # 8075) on :
Yes, but not much. I am hoping to get more in next week.
Posted by Brad R Torgersen (Member # 8211) on :
I shipped off 13,500 words, via novelette, to Writers of the Future.
=^)
Posted by Symphonyofnames (Member # 8283) on :
Planned and completed the first draft of a short story for a contest. Editing and rewriting time approaches.
Posted by aspirit (Member # 7974) on :
Yes, last week I wrote a couple pages of rough draft for a new short story and a few pages of world building notes for a novel, and revised a few pages of another novel. That's not bad considering I needed to unpack from a trip, visit with my husband's sister who was visiting from out of state, and work extra hours at the office.
