I am short on time so I am making this short. The idea of this note is to entice those of us who don't write regularly to try to develop good writing habits. By posting at this note every week, the urge to write during the past week so you can report well will become stronger.
I generally list things that can be writing in these notes. The essence is that if you have to ask if it is writing, it is. And we don't care much as to how much. It could be a goal of opening some work in progress to writing thousands of words during the week.
As for me, my writing has been slim. Long work days and home stuff that needed to be done got in the way. I am getting a better ides as to where my new story is going. I should do a story idea version of it to act as a guide, but I tend to actually try to write first. I have a major problem in my stories. the best stories have where the character is at the very edge of failure and somehow pulls it out. My plots never get my character into that situation. I noticed it in something I wrote recently. I cannot seem to give my character a chance to fail. I have to work on that. I have come up with a problem my character has to solve and it is going to relocate one of the scenes I already wrote to near the end of the story. That requires re-plotting again in my barely designed guidelines (plot).
On the story idea front, including what I am posting tonight, I have 51 story ideas in my compost pile. I came up with four ideas just tonight. A lot of the new ones look like they will be good to write. I like that. I prefer ideas that are in the stack because I have not had a chance to write it, not that I decided to write something else.
I made some visible headway on one of two carving projects intended for the art show in March. One of the projects is a dragon carved in wood. I have a long way to go on that. I am sort of afraid to make a mistake so have been hesitating too much. The other project is a vase with five faces carved on it. I just had to get myself to mount the wood on the lathe to make it into a vase. I have more to do on hollowing the vase out, but I have the outside formed and can start carving the faces. I now just have to decide what the faces will look like based on my carving skills. Of course there are small fun things that I need to work on too. The dragon is both the easiest and the hardest piece to work on. The wood gives me the basic shape, but I have to make sure the limbs are in the right position and that is the hard part. Once I get it going, it should go very quickly, other than my power carving creates dust and I get quite covered on bad days. I started woodworking Saturday, January 17, 2000. This last weekend was my official celebration of my wood start of woodworking. Too bad my work does not look like I have all those years in it. I only work on weekends and holidays so it takes longer to accumulate real hours of woodworking compared to doing it as a serious hobby or as a profession.
Using the above as a story idea, He made religious icons.,They had to be made very carefully, using the proper chants to get the magic right. Sometimes he might take a standard type of wood and make the shape out of that, or he used wood that resembled the final shape, which was extremely powerful. Using the shaped wood was also dangerous. One had to get the shape out of the wood right or it could turn on him. He once got in trouble when he found a piece of wood that resembled a lion. He got some of the detail wrong and it came alive and attacked him. He had to cut it apart to stop it. He then had to find all the bits and pieces and dispose of them using the proper chants to destroy the demon spirit that had entered it. at the moment, he has a piece of wood that resembles a dragon. He has a deadline to get the dragon done, but he is in panic to get it right. Dragons cannot be stopped by carving tools.
As to the question of the week,
I can honestly say, with some shame of how little,
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I haven't written creatively since shortly before November 27, 2010. On Nov. 27, I saw a really bad thing, and my life pretty much shut-down. Thanks to an intervention and subsequent counseling, I've been slowly rebuilding and finding a new sense of normal. These past few weeks, I've been noticing and storing interesting tidbits of conversation, the kind that make great story fodder. Last night, I suddenly realized a component to an old story I was previously stumped over, and it actually excited me. I think I'm ready to reconnect with an old passion, rather than just struggle to survive. I am writing this evening. It's clunky and not very inspired, but it is a step in the right direction.
Posts: 90 | Registered: Aug 2006
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Yep. Released my first novel and then wrote the first two chapters (8400 words) of the sequel. A bit slower going than I'd like but hopefully I'll get into the swing of it soon.
Posts: 70 | Registered: Apr 2011
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Hey Wonderbus, You gonna give us a link or what? I think it's ok around these parts to list it, right?
I'm still working on my how-to, but I find it's warping my brain a little bit. I feel as if I've zoomed in so far all I see are the pixels on the letters I'm typing. Need to back up a bit and take in the big picture again.
However, other than the warping, this has been, and continues to be, an enriching experience. I'm learning a ton. Essentially, I'm writing and organizing notes so that others may understand what I'm saying.
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Thursday, I finished up the second draft of the thing I was working on these last few weeks...after that, I was pretty much spent, and haven't done any writing or revision.
I started one of my semi-annual timewasters, the cutting-up of comics printed out from the web and pasting them in spiral notebooks. I have a pile of 'em going back to last July (I've worked through 'em up to August but there's a way to go yet.)
Also yesterday a sore throat developed, and this morning it seemed I was robbed of all energy. I managed some of my usual stuff, but not all of it---didn't have the energy to go online till now. It may be a cold developing...if it does, that'll lay me low for the next week or so.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Did I write? Yes I did, but it was rewriting what I wrote last week But is only 2 edits away from submitting. 1-to get it all final and 2-to dot the i's and cross the t's.
Posts: 1168 | Registered: Mar 2008
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Thanks for buying it axe, and keep me in mind when you start Sunday Killer again if you need any critters.
Posts: 70 | Registered: Apr 2011
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I finished editing the second draft of Dark Mirror last night, did a couple of writing prompts over the last week or so and made some notes on a variety of story ideas.
Tonight, I can't seem to settle to anything, probably a result of too many possibilities after months of focusing on a single thing other than work. Oh well. Tomorrow, there is always tomorrow to start on the sequel (which I had already begun to outline anyway). I'm going to leave DM in the virtual drawer for at least a few days before I reread and, unless it totally bites, send it out to a couple beta readers.
oh, and a couple of blog posts in between all that editing.
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