It is that time of the week, where you suddenly realized the week was shorter than you planned. You look at your files containing your work in progress and wonder if you met your goals for the week. your goals could be several thousand words, or your goals could be opening just the work to have a look. The idea of this note is to tell about what is going on in your life, and also about what is going on in your writing. The idea of writing about your life is to develop the habit of reporting in. When you don't have any writing to mention, hopefully the shame of not writing will set in and one will actually work to open the work during the next week.
How much writing is not important. What is writing is quite varied. All new writing is writing. Editing, even if it is on the work of others, is writing. Critiquing is a form of writing and counts. Blogging, writing assignments, technical writing, article writing, poetry, world and character development are writing. Bulletin board posts and E-mails can be writing if they are very wordy and pertain to writing or stories can be writing. Essentially, if you have to ask if it is writing, the answer is yes.
As for me, I am editing through my SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE story. I am not trying to add words, but improve what I have. The word count will likely inch up, but that is not my goal. I figure it is long enough. I have made several passes on the first twenty odd pages, I am fixing and correcting the story this time, rather than rewriting it as I did before. each time I read through the piece, I find passages that could be said better. Hopefully, it is becoming a better story. There are scenes that need more added to them to make them complete. My middle fight scenes are really bad and need to be reworked. In those fights, my character is supposed to just rough up the thugs and they do something that really ticks her off and she loses it, killing them. That description is not what I have right now. I have her fighting to the death and they tick her off and she goes berserk and pummels them. I will correct the fight scenes when I get to them, even re-writing them completely if needed. Even without trying, I added 484 words this week.
On the story idea front. It looked like I was going to fall behind this weekend but somehow stayed caught up with the date. My compost pile is down to 31 story ideas. This is essentially the top of the really old ideas. I would have had to dig into them tonight except I came up with one just a while ago. I had used up all the newer ideas this past week. I did come up with a couple, but not enough to keep from skimming the top. Likely a good third of the compost pile ideas are good, but deserve more work to write than they would get as a story idea. Once written they are gone, done.
Outside of writing, Each year since 2003, I have made a set of four different ornaments every year. A few years I made more, and a couple years, I made less than the set of four. Week before last, I started re-making some ornaments from previous years that needed to be made. Last week, I came up with my first two ideas for this year, palm trees and seals. I stopped at a store and saw a figurine of a polar bear and decided not to buy it as something to go by. a couple days later I decided I would make them. they would be easy to make. I then came up with my fourth ornament Saturday Morning as I was gong to work. I made one, including the paint, just to see how hard it would be and how it would look. My cornucopia ornaments is my favorite this year. I like the results and they are fun to carve. Now all I have to do is to make a dozen of each ornament to have a complete set, and try to get them all done before the end of the month.... The worse part is that I've been thinking about what ornament to make since like June and had no ideas until now. It was the same for last year. I offer them for sale to friends at different places, and then gift a bunch to friends and family at Christmas. The money pays for tools and materials in my woodworking hobby, at least that is the intent. I will make some of each imminently so I have some to show and then work at making the rest as time and demand dictates. I have a bunch of "blanks" from previous years that still have to be carved. One uses the band saw to remove the excess wood from the block to make the blank, and then carve the rest of it to the final shape and details.
As to the question of the week,
YES, I DID WRITE.
DID YOU WRITE?
Posted by C@R3Y (Member # 9669) on :
I did write. I have been a little down and too harsh on my writing lately, but that will pass, as it always does for me. I just wrote the shortest story I have ever written, at 280 words. During the week, I have been doing a lot of opening old projects to see if I can improve them, and, soon, send them out.
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
Yes, I did. Almost all on MAGIC'S FOOL, which is flowing really well right now.
Also, a couple of crits and two blog posts. Posted by Bent Tree (Member # 7777) on :
I did! And for the first time in a long, long time, I remembered what it was like to think of myself as a writer! Now, to keep up the momentum!
Posted by Heresy (Member # 1629) on :
Very definitely, I wrote. As I've mentioned before, I'm doing NaNo this year, and over the last week, I made a few milestones, the biggest one being hitting (and surpassing) 50,000 words. Up to 56,297 as of end of day Sunday. Still going too, as the story is not finished by a long shot. I just had to redo about half my outline over the weekend actually, as one of my two mc's insisted on a detour that rendered everything but the very end wrong. Oh well, I think I like it better this way. Yes, Tavis, you were right.
Also finding my brain is producing ideas and fragments of ideas like crazy, so I'm dutifully writing down what I get of them and then going back to writing my NaNo project. I'll sort them out later.
On the crappy side of life, my iMac started refusing to turn on this morning and is now at the Apple Store being repaired. Thankfully, that's not the computer I write first draft on. That one is fine. *knocks on every wooden object she can find*
-Heresy
Posted by Owasm (Member # 8501) on :
I wrote and rewrote thousands of words.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
A little slower---several crowded busy days this week---but I continued apace, five hundred words at a shot, on revisions on three of those days. And in addition, on Thursday, I actually sat down and wrote something semi-original.
I say "semi-original," 'cause it's something I've worked on before, several times, since the 1990s. But it flared up in my mind again, and I see a few angles on it I didn't see back then. No referring back to the earlier stuff---I just started from scratch---and a different point in the story.
Haven't worked on it since, but, like I said, it's been a busy week. I should be able to claw out some time this week, what with the Thanksgiving holiday and all, even though I'm hosting and doing some of the cooking...
Posted by Crank (Member # 7354) on :
Actual writing? Not much. Less than a thousand new words all week long. Even my editing exploits were thin.
Now...if research is considered a part of the writing cause (and, as far as I'm conserned, it is), then, yes, I did write.