It is that time of the week again. You report what happened in your life this week whether you wrote or not, and then tell about your writing or why not. To have to report that you did not write is intended to be an incentive to actually open your work in progress, and hopefully do something with it.
How much counts as writing can be anywhere from one word to thousands. Opening your work is most important. We don't care if it is something old or brand new. new writing is always thought of as writing, but so is editing, even if it is the work of someone else. Critiquing is also editing. When editing one might be adding content or cutting something back to publication size. We have all had times where we edited something, going through a number of pages, deleting passages and adding new, and end up with near the same word count. Word count during editing does not matter. Poetry, writing assignments, blogging, article writing, technical writing, world or character creation are all writing. Even E-mails can be writing if they are wordy and pertain to story or writing. If you have to ask if it is writing, our answer is yes.
As for me, I working through an edit of my first Waxy story for the editor. I started out at 41 pages with all the comments. I am eliminating comments as I make the changes and am down to page 28 of what is now 40 pages. Some scenes require some thought or work but others flow rapidly. Right now, I am in the middle of a major change in the story, eliminating some bothersome sections while making it work. One change here effects other things. During my last editing session, I stopped when it got tough.
On the story idea front, New ideas started appearing again. I am at 45 story ideas, not counting what I am posting tonight, and the top few of those are good new ideas.
On woodworking, I should finish my second fairy next weekend. My main project is making a base for her. She is painted and has her wings, and the king frog is made and painted. I have to create the base so it looks good, which will require some more mushrooms which I will make on the lathe. I found out that I am not a carpenter. Mom needed a frame to hold some stuff up off the carpet in case of a leak. I measured carefully and cut carefully and yet my creation was not square. It did not help that the batteries of my battery powered drill refused to hold a charge, and the switch of the electric drill decided to not work in reverse and struggle in the normal direction. It also did not help that I was told AFTER IT WAS DONE, a tip that would have made it a whole lot easier. If I did it again, I might do it better. I had the right concepts, but execution is not there.
For a story idea, you have a bunch of people who are program-educated. All the knowledge of mankind is pumped into their brains. they are then sent to a new site to build a colony of their own. The problem is that while they have knowledge, they were never given the skills. There is knowledge one cannot gain unless you do it and you learn by doing it wrong. They have limited resources, the people who set up the project presumed the youngsters would do things as master workers would so they did not allow for a lot of mistakes. The colony is built, but nothing like the designers expected because of a loss of supplies during the learning process. by the time the youngsters mastered the basic skills their "book knowledge" was fading away.
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Terrible week in terms of writing, but a good week overall. My parents came in from out of town to see our boys (and us, but really just the boys). I got through a half of a chapter of my novel and came to the realization that my short story should be in the first person instead of third, so started fixing that before I get too far.
I updated my blog and sent out two stories that came back as rejections.
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I heavily revised a short story (which I still think is somehow broken, even though I like it), restructured a second (which is better but the ending still bothers me), lightly revised a third (which is probably good to go if I wasn't such a procrastinator), and then over the weekend I put away my editing hat and shoved through the end of my novel draft, so about 7500 words on that alone. Now I can finally see how broken it is for draft 2, and how dumb I was for revising before finishing. This morning I did a 1400 word short which may be too mean to work on further, although I took sadistic glee while doing it.
I also visited a live writing group, which was okay, and then I found some weird online board where people post threads asking if people wrote. They also have this strange obsession with the number thirteen, and it's contagious.
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I started my prologue. I have a couple of other chapters, but the prologue's been bummin' me out. Well, I'm happy with it so far. But it's been slow going. I only got a couple of paragraphs down. But they're good paragraphs, and I'm happy with them.
I'd love to finish (the prologue) this week, but I'm not sure where I'll find the time. Sick wife, grad school, kids, and work are slowing me down. One foot in front of the other, I guess.
[This message has been edited by JBShearer (edited March 28, 2011).]
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Yes, indeed I did. I had a fairly slow start to this past week, and the weekend didn't start out overly great either, even though I took Friday off from work. I had a slightly ill cat who was growling and hissing at everyone and generally needed to be kept separated from our other cat. He's better now, but it was hard to get any writing done Thursday night and Friday because of that. I pushed myself to write on Saturday though, even though I didn't feel like it, because the cat was calming down and I knew I'd feel better if I at least tried. It was a good day, and Sunday was even better. I managed to somewhat exceed my goal for the week (after thinking I'd be lucky to get half of it), putting in 5.5k instead of the goal of 5k. The current total for Elemental is now 25.5k, so I'm almost back to what I had when I tore the original attempt apart (35k). And I'm still happy with what I'm getting down and the direction(s) it's going in. I've got enough notes for concrete scenes to probably get me through another 10-15k words, by which time I expect to have more scenes figured out and loosely outlined.
I'm making my goal for this week 5.5k, since I've already proven I can do that and I want to push myself to produce a little more, to pick up the pace as much as I can while still being happy with what I'm producing. I think I should be able to at least meet this goal, if not exceed it. As of today, this week is shaping up well already.
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Just under 6k last week, but a lot of world building and plotting done for th next WIP. Some blogging too.
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The week started off slow, mostly because I was working through a creativity block, but also because I was working on logistics of creating a language (or at least a few words of one.)
After I got past those little hurdles I managed to make alot of progress. I've been struggling through some health issues, and if I'm at home in bed I'm usually writing. I think I'm up to about 10k words for the week. My "little" project is now up to 150 pages of manuscript. This is the most that I've ever written on one project.
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Yes hurray! Almost 35 pages within the last two days for the fanfiction book I'm writing. Not to sound boastful, but it's awesomesauce slathered over glory.
I'd taken a long, long break from this story to work on something else, but now it's great to be back to it. After my other book this one practically writes itself.
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Spent the week writing up the second draft of a story, and finished that draft Monday. Now it's all revision and polishing---and figuring out where, if anywhere, to submit it, 'cause it's still not science fiction or fantasy, and I don't know a thing about what markets are out there for that sort of thing.
Meanwhile...there's one more story in my "I want to work on this" queue of rough drafts, and I should get to that shortly. But a dream that adds up to two scenes of a story, without a plot or explanation to go with it, are bubbling up and I may write them out first.
(I took the weekend off---largely so I could celebrate my birthday and to see that I was physically able to do the same---but the extra time didn't mean any extra writing. I pretty much wrote what I would've if I'd'a been working, five hundred words a day. I did clean out my library a little in my spare time yesterday, though.)
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Geez, how the week flies by. Yes I wrote last week, and critted, so I am feeling pretty good. Been trying my hand at first person pov, the verdict is still out on it.
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Approximately 3K new words. Editing. Updating my web site every time my first two epub stories become accessible on Diesel, B&N, etc. In other words...the usual.
I'm looking to make this coming 7 day stretch a bit more extrordinary.
Finished the first revision of one story and started a new story. This one is UF and involves a different type of main character. I got the idea while another story of mine was being critted on another site. This MC was suggested during that time. It would have changed that story too much but the idea intrigued me. The original story or first 13 lines, might be post some time soon. It's what I call a simple story some evidently think its too simple.
And I wrote on my two novels and the revision of the third.
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