"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."
-Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Friday, February 15, 2008

Inspiration

I love Thursdays. It's great to spend all day talking with other writers. And tonight I wrote some stuff in Ordinary Dreams & Writing (my evening writers' group) that I really, really like.

I love it when I come away from something with that giddy, thrilling feeling of "I really am a good writer!"

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Progress

I haven't done any writing today, but I did manage to apply for unemployment payments, so I should hopefully be able to pay my rent for awhile. I also may be able to work freelance for a bit, which would give me more writing time. And yesterday, in addition to getting laid off, I managed to finally get E&L to a point where I can really start writing it and got 897 words written. It's a start.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

So Much for My Writing Schedule

So today I got the news that my hours at work will be reduced to nothing and I need to find a new job. Things could be worse - I shouldn't have to worry about money too much while I job-hunt - but I'm a bit worried about my writing goals.

With this job I worked part-time, flexible hours at home. I somehow doubt that I'll be able to find another situation like that. Once I'm working full-time and commuting, finding the time and energy to write is going to be a lot harder. Right now I'm scheduled to write 20 hours a week and I've been managing to be productive about 10 - 15 of those hours. I'm kind of scared to do the calculation of how much time I'll have to write once I'm out of the house 60 hours a week or so.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Outline finished!

I finally buckled down and did it, and I finished the outline for RoB&F yesterday. I'm using a nifty free program named yWriter to organise my editing notes; I've never used any writing software before and am finding yWriter to be helpful, at least for this project.

I did all the prework for this novel in about an hour. Seriously. The project I'd had lined up for last year's NaNo wasn't working, it was day 5, and I decided to scrap everything and start with a whole new idea. Amazingly, the project worked. But it does mean that I have more work to do in the editing stage.

I also figured out and wrote down the theme, summary, character arc for the main character and a few other important bits, the way Holly Lisle recommends in her One-Pass Revision Workshop. I did it a bit backwards from her - I outlined the book and made editing notes before I figured out the theme. That was largely because after 50,000 words in 30 days (actually, I wrote the last 30,000 words in about 6 days), written without an outline, I needed to get an overview of the work before I could verbalise out what the book was about!

Next I'm going to go through, scene by scene, and make the changes I've noted. After that it'll be time for a read-through and to send it out for others to look at. I meant to only deal with major structural revisions on this pass, but I think I'll end up dealing with all the problems I see right now, and hopefully minimize future passes.

Today I managed to finish the bulk of the pre-work for E&L as well. I can't see anything else I need to figure out before I start writing, at least. I'm going to start writing and see if I get hung up again.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Weekly review

This wasn't a great week for progress on my goals. I did a lot of writing for an unproductive week - 7 1/4 hours and 4,773 words - but that was all on a "fun" project, not anything publishable. Other than that I managed to outline 2 scenes on RoB&F.

I did have a great meeting with my writers' group, the Word DaWGz, though. (I know, the name will never gain us the respectability of something like the Elks Club. It's short for Daytime Writers' Group.) My whole plan for this year was to have three primary projects, one in each major phase - development, writing and editing. And I thought I'd managed it, but I'm really not quite there yet.

I am developing TAWS, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for that novel. But I'm supposed to be writing E&L, and when I tried I realised I needed to almost completely change one of the main characters, add a whole new subplot and move the beginning of the story back significantly. So I'm actually developing that one, too.

And RoB&F, which I'm editing? Well, it's currently right around 50,000 words. In order to make it publishable I need to add about 30,000 more words. Which is actually fine; there were a couple of places in the story that I skimmed where I want to develop it more and I left a huge opportunity for an early, unsuccessful confrontation with the antagonist that I didn't use. But that means that, in figuring out where the spots that need more writing are and what I'm going to do with them, RoB&F is really in the development stage right now, as well.

So what I'm going to do is focus on one project until it's out of the development stage - probably E&L, because I think it's closest. Then I will work on E&L (writing) and RoB&F until I have RoB&F out of the development stage. And then I'll be able to add in TAWS and I'll have a project for whatever mood I'm in. And one of the people in my group, E--, suggested that I block out time for each project instead of waiting for inspiration to strike about which to work on, so I'll be trying to do that as well. And I'll be using my fun project as a reward - I'll only allow myself to work on it if I've met my daily goals.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Plan

I think I've figured out how I'm going to handle my blogs. I'll be using this blog as my writing blog, and my LiveJournal account (http://skadhisgydhja.livejournal.com/) as my personal journal. I'll be trying to post at least a little bit to each every day.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

It's My Mum's Fault

I had to create a blog here, as well, so that I can comment on her blog. My primary blog is at http://skadhisgydhja.livejournal.com/; I'm not sure yet how I'm going to handle cross-posting.

I need a spreadsheet to keep track of all my web presences. *sigh*