I bet some of you are just getting back into the swing of things after the Thanksgiving holiday, hoping to stay in it for just a couple weeks before Christmas and New year messes you up again. This note is mainly for those who write maybe once every few months. This is an opportunity to shame yourself into writing By posting here whether you have written or not. After a few times of not writing, you will feel shame and start writing so you can feel good about accomplishing anything. For the rest of us, we can feel shame for not meeting some goal we aimed for, during the week.
How much to write is not important. It is more about first opening some work in progress or starting something new. The more you do the better but opening something is the most important part. As to what is writing, It can be just about anything. New writing is of course writing. Editing, even if it is the work of others is also writing. Critiquing is a form of editing and therefore counts. Poetry, technical writing, blogging, writing assignments, article writing, world and character creation, synopsis, outlining are all writing. Bulletin board writing and E-mails can be writing if they are wordy and pertain to writing or story. Of course, many of these might not be looked at as writing. The rule is, though, if you have to ask if it is writing, the answer is yes.
As for me, Yes I have been writing. I got to THE END on my Spirit of Vengeance story on the clean up editing pass I did. I am now in the final stages of editing. I ran it through two grammar checks this weekend. I have two others, plus reading aloud. With grammar checks, each author considers certain things a problem. They will flag those things as a problem. I used one ages ago that flagged FROM and asked if I really wanted FORM. It was something the author felt was important. There are standard problems they flag that we all would agree with. Then they have flags that basically say "there is a problem with this sentence but I have no idea what it is." Grammar checks are also not designed for fiction. Conversation throws them into a tizzy. "foreign" names also bother them a lot. The help files and instructions are written by people who know language in detail, for people who do not need a grammar check. The key to using a grammar check is to learn what to ignore and what to pay attention to. I used two of my programs and they did help. I did get a kick that they disagreed with the spelling of one word, though.
On the story idea front, I have 40 story ideas, including the one I am posting tonight, in my compost pile., It would have been a worse except that I came up with four new story ideas today. I was getting down to the top of the permanent compost pile. I cannot remember if I mentioned it and won't bother checking, but I did one story idea at the end of last month that was supposed to be two. It dawned on me that the first one was simply a description of a disaster. The second one was the aftermath. I combined the two. I have one other double story idea in the stack. Last month, I posted 30 story ideas for a 30 day month and it ended up on Page 35 with 21229 words of pure drivel. One never knows when one might spark one's imagination I happened with my Spirit of Vengeance story. It was originally a story idea. It looks little like the original idea but that is not important. If twenty people wrote stories from that same story idea, we would have twenty different stories when they went to market. It is why I have no problems using ones I have already posted. I started posting these story ideas in December 1997. I need to locate about two year's worth of files in my backup disks to be able to work out exactly how many stories I have posted. at an idea a day, It is a lot of ideas and I doubt I have repeated one.
I brought my Christmas ornaments to work today. I have at least six of each kind of ornament. I really need twelve of each but I have enough to start. I got an idea for a bowl that would be a turkey. I was going to have the tail integral to the bowl and add the carved head. While trying to work out the process, I decided I should try it small, a Christmas ornament, to see if my concepts would even work. My first attempt showed me I did not fully given thought to the shape of the body. I had it backwards. After some thought, I decided to carve it by hand. When I was done, I showed the unpainted carving to my mom who tried to set it on the tail and have me add a tail to the belly. Oops. I did some touch-ups and then painted it. Once painted she saw what I was doing with it. Now I am considering making a bunch of them as Christmas ornaments using corrections I learned on the first one.
I heard on the radio that they are going to take some genetics found in a mastodon bone and clone it into an African elephant The host asked if we have not learned from Jurassic park yet. Consider if we somehow got dinosaurs to come alive and start breeding them. Since one line of research says they are related to birds, and birds essentially taste like chicken, think of raising dinosaurs for food. Harvesting the eggs, The babies sold as big chickens. The adults processed for slabs of chicken or mass produced chicken products. think of how many chicken nuggets an adult dinosaur would provide. My original thought was for something like Velociraptor or T-rex but herbivores would be better as what would you use to feed a predator? There are always dietary concerns when eating a predator.
As to the question of the week, I can honestly say,
YES I DID WRITE!!!
DID YOU WRITE???
Posted by Heresy (Member # 1629) on :
Yup. It was a busy week. NaNoWriMo ended, with me at 96,165 word but not done the story yet. So I kept slogging away and Saturday, I reached that magical place I had never been to before: typing The End on a novel. It was kind of amazing and even more so when I realized I had written about 107k words in 33 days.
I spent the next day first in anxiety because I didn't have the book to write, then in full panic mode when I broke my promise to myself and started reading the book and realized I was wrong. I don't have to rewrite half of it, I have to rewrite the whole thing I think. But I managed to calm down with some friends helping a lot, and now I'm just thinking through general stuff with it, first half idea rewrites and overall story stuff, as I outline my next new project. No more reading the manuscript for at least a week.
-Julie
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
Congratulations, Julie. It's great to get to "The End" isn't it?
As for me, yes I did write. It's been slow but I'm starting back up on BLOOD IS THICKER. Finished Chapter 16 this morning. On to Chapter 17.
Oh, and a crit and two blog posts. Posted by Heresy (Member # 1629) on :
I think The End would have been better without the next day panic, but for about half a day, it was marvellous. Maybe It'll be better next time with (hopefully) less panicking. As it was, The End seemed an awful lot more like just another beginning than I expected...
I may start in a week or so with the redraft, if I'm ready for it, have figured out enough things. It'll be fun to get back to the challenge of writing 2k per day.
-Julie
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
I had a pretty good week, even by my standards. Maybe especially by them. Normally I write five hundred words a day...but this time, I'd write five hundred words, then come back in a few hours and write five hundred more, and so on, and so on. I even found myself finding time to write a little on my "busy" days, where I usually let it go. I'm at eleven thousand words total---probably it'll come in somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand when I'm done.
The story itself is a muddy mess---not exactly original, with what I originally intended as the climax coming about a quarter of the way into it---and it would and will take a lot of work to make something out of it. But right now I'm having too much fun writing it to stop and work on it---and, since money for my writing is only a theoretical possibility, I'm going for the fun.
Posted by Owasm (Member # 8501) on :
I wrote a short story (flash 1,000 words) and worked on my WotF entry. I'm currently rewriting a novel for e-pubbing and added about 4,000 words to the MS this week.
Heresy: Congrats on your NaNo novel. Mine is currently being proofread for e-pubbing this month. (It's half the length of yours.)
Posted by LeetahWest (Member # 9402) on :
congrats on all the hard work guys! I started NaNo half way through and got 10k words in four days, then realized I really didn't know anything about my novel. So I scrapped that project for now and started a new one. I have about 6k words in outline and research. No manuscript first drafting started, but I will get there far sooner with this story than my first one.
Posted by Crank (Member # 7354) on :
Not much on new word count, but the editing process on my mainstream novel, my two science fiction short stories, and my two (maybe three) flash fiction stories, as well as my research exploits, went very well.
Congrats, Heresy! "The End" is such a gratifying phrase to type.
S!
Posted by LDWriter2 (Member # 9148) on :
I did some.
Finished the story I stopped working on in Nov. Started revising it.
Worked twice on "New Mage" WIP
Worked on the revision of the last chapter of "Breaking Out". I am adding a ground battle I didn't have time to put in when I wrote it so I will probably be splitting this chapter into two when I get done with it. That would mean 8 chapters for around 53 to 56 thousand words.
I did two crits. Some posts here and a couple on the NaNo forum. A few E-mails and
Oh yeah some revising on Q1 WotF story.
Posted by Tiergan (Member # 7852) on :
Overall pretty pleased with the week. Wrote, which hasnt been of late. Got about 2k. the bad news it included to different first scenes. Story stops there. Gathering ideas, just not able to cross that little stall gap yet.
Posted by History (Member # 9213) on :
Sent out THE KABBALIST: A MADNESS MOST DISCREET My hope was to finally finish EREV TOV this week.
But...I'm still being a dutiful son-in-law and acting as agent with my 85 y.o. mother-in-law's Holocaust memoir AGAINST ALL ODDS (now with a local publisher).
And...my 83 y.o. father [website http://www.donefinegold.com/ ]just finished his eighth crime novel (75K words) and sent it to me for editing.
Ah, well.
Respectfully, Dr. Bob
Posted by LDWriter2 (Member # 9148) on :
Is that the one some of us partially critted?
Posted by History (Member # 9213) on :
Hi, LD.
I'm not sure of which tale you are referring.
No. MADNESS is a new KABBALIST novelette initially intended for WOTF.
My novella THAT I SHALL HEARKEN TO HIS VOICE was rejected by WOTF and, since MADNESS contains many of the same characters and is of the same genre (Jewish urban fantasy), I determined my KABBALIST stories are not WOTF winning material.
You were also one of the Hatrackers involved in our Novel Chapter Exchange Group who did critique the first three chapters of my KABBALIST novel. Perhaps you are recalling this.
The initial 1st 13 of the story EREV TOV were posted here in the past. It is a more classical fantasy story (albeit still deriving some elements from Jewish folklore and history). I think it may be a better fit for WOTF than my urban fantasy stories. If rejected, I'll reserve science fiction without any Jewish elements for future WOTF submissions.
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