Welcome to my world, a world of humiliation or acclaim. This is the place to stand before the world and declare whether you wrote at any time this week to live up to your at least smallest potential, you back-slid, let something unimportant, such as life, to get in the way of greatness. The hope is that this note will get you to write, knowing it is coming, you will sit down and put something on paper, even if it is but a sentence or paragraph. Preferably, it will force you to develop the habit of writing at least once a week every week. If you can write more, then so much the better. The idea is to develop a habit that is not bad.
As to what you can claim as writing, It is a matter of opinion and I know of no one who will complain about how you define writing. We all know that anything new, is writing. when I read the notes, that is what most refer to as their work. Editing is also writing, even if it is someone else's work. So is critiquing. Poetry, technical articles, blogging, writing assignments are also writing. World or character building is also writing, though it is best that something gets on paper. E-mails can be writing if there is a lot of words and it pertains to writing or stories. As you can see, we are not picky on what is writing. If you think it is writing, then it has to be. What is more, how much one has written does not matter. It can be one sentence , one word, or fifty pages. If you did anything at all, it is something and therefore counts as writing.
As for me, Yes, I did write. I came to AN ending on my Waxy story. I do not know if it will be THE ending. I will wait for my writing partner to make suggestions sometime this weekend. I have to decide whether to return to the beginning and edit all over again, or write on something else for a little bit of a break. I has been fun to see the words appear on screen. When I left you last week. The story was on page 75 with 49972 words. I zapped the notes I had so it dropped down to page 72 with 48801 words. At the ending I have, I am now at page 76 with 50602 words. Keep in mind that this is single spaced. Much of the newest stuff is as week as my story ideas, not taking time to really develop the story. I will fix that on the next pass. I have some concepts I got to get into the story earlier and that will be a key thing in the next edit. My writing partner's comments will help on how much and what direction to add the concepts. I do have some other Waxy stories that are roughed out, or not finished, that I can dig into at my next writing. I will see what I actually do next.
On the story idea front, Today, because I got involved in something, I am now one day behind on the story ideas. I can catch that up quickly, no problem.
On Thanksgiving, We gather at my brother's house. His house is dark, they are playing movies and games I have no interest in, and there is way too many people for the room he has, so I tend to sit outside and work wood, carve. Each year, I create some Christmas ornaments, hand carving them out of wood. This has been a tradition for me since 2003. I got my act together this weekend and got a bunch of my blanks ready for carving. I use the bandsaw to remove the excess wood so I can spend my time shaping the final figure rather than removing wood that is in the way. I intend to sit and carve ornaments all day long.
Last week I mentioned about weight loss and someone asked about how one can lose weight without changing anything. Our bodies are designed to survive famines. When our bodies detect what might be a famine, it will lock down on the fat and nutrients until it is over. Usually, when we go on a diet, the body thinks it is a famine, since not as much calories are coming in, so it locks down and refuses to let the fat go. When we change our eating habits, the body can get confused and think there is a famine still going on so we end up hitting plateaus, Sometimes referred to as set points, and our weight loss stops. What I saw the past two weeks is that the latest plateau has ended and I am losing again. My body decided that I am not on a famine and is allowing the fat to be used up again. I have dropped, even momentarily, below a key weight milestone and "I did the happy dance" when I saw the numbers on the scale. I am within range of a weight I had not seen since in the 1980s.
I already took the above as a story idea, earlier this week, but thought to pass it on anyway. A space station colony has a serious weight problem, 600 pounds is light. A new medicine comes out that is supposed to aid in weight loss. it eliminates the set point while losing weight. The body never detects famine and keeps giving up the pounds. One day, a space war starts, trade with planets and other space stations is cut off, then the power supplies to the farming sections is damaged. there is suddenly a famine, people are eating a few thousand calories rather than their normal intake. Those who avoided the medicine don't lose weight all that fast, and some are accused of having extra food stores. Those who have the medicine lose weight, which at first is exciting news, but as the food available gets less and less, they are wasting away. The effects of the medicine cannot be reversed. When food and parts finally arrive, the natural people are still big, but nothing like they were, and the ones with the medicine are skin and bones and never fully recover.
I completed a rewrite of the first five chapters of THE IGNORED PROPHECY. And I'm about to complete the second revision on BLOOD WILL TELL. Now I can get both of those into the hands of a reader this weekend.
I also did a little on my new project SEVEN STARS.
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Did a flash and resurrected an old short. Nano consumed me and I finished it all at 105K in twenty days. Just barely didn't burn out.
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My production dropped way off this week, partly due to a busy week, but probably more to some indecision about how to bring the story through to one-of-many endings. Either way, writing went down, and down to five hundred words a session at that.
Meanwhile, I had my previous story bounced by one magazine, and as soon as I could find the time to put it together, I mailed it out to another.
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Wolfe_boy, is it a time-constraint problem, or a "how do I end this so it works?" problem?
If the former, please accept my best wishes that you can find the time.
If the latter, may I recommend going over the M.I.C.E. discussion in OSC's HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY in which he talks about how each kind of story needs to end to answer the question created at the beginning of the story and thus provide satisfactory resolution for the reader.
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