Results of Ruminations

It's been too long. Last time I wrote was back on the 3rd of March, apparently. I've had....things in between then and now that prevented me getting here. Next week, being Conference Saturday and all, probably means another unexpected and unwanted sabbatical. Oh, well. Perhaps I'll get a day during Spring Break when I drop the kids off at Grandma's and I come and write. It could happen. I'm in an interesting predicament that I'm not familiar with. Under normal circumstances, I have a vague idea of what I want the final scene to be like in my story. I can then gently nude the tale toward that ending, working toward this last moment. I did that with The Terra Campaign: Impetus, Words of the Silenced, and  Tales from the Flame,  all of which had endings that I cooked up long before I put them on paper. In the case of Tales , the ending was ambiguous and unfulfilled--much like the story as a whole. Impetus  had a happy ending, while Words  was sad but not i...

I wrote unexpectedly efficiently today. Due to scheduling issues, I got started later than is normal by nearly an hour. Yet here it is, 5 o'clock, and I'm writing my blog after updating my TimeGlider  and mulling over the pacing of the story. I was expecting to be hammering away for another hour, yet I'm getting the distinct feeling that I should stop....and that I should keep going. It's kind of rough, to be honest. I don't know if I really want to go on, mostly because I postponed the consequences of what I wrote about last time (a character getting stabbed) by shifting to a different character for this chapter. But I can't keep the reader in too much suspense--if I don't shift back and deal with the stabbing, then it's going to feel like I'm just toying with the readers, and that's lame. I don't want that to happen. Of course, I could go and write a flashback...but I'm not certain that I want to do that right now, since the scene tha...

WOOHOO! I did it! By 5:15, I had knocked out a couple hundred more words than I needed to actually hit my goal. I officially have 250,288 words in Writ in Blood . Awesome. Today, when I sat down, I had just under 5,000 words to crank out. Knowing how close I was to getting my goal, I admit that I checked my word count more often than I usually do. It's kind of like waiting for midnight on New Year's Eve--there's very little that's immediately different on one side of the even than the other, but part of the fun is the anticipation. So I knocked down one chapter (more on that later) and, feeling upset at what I'd just done, I decided to create a flashback for Nic in the prior chapter. That came out fairly easily--which worries me, as I don't trust myself when things go too right for too long--and, by and by, I finished my goal. Just like that. With 250,000 words (oh, for a dollar per word, I tell ya) in the rear view mirror, where do I go from here? Well, ...

On Endings Today's output put me just over the 4100 word mark, which is gratifying and really quite unexpected. This also puts me just below 5,000 words to hit my goal of 250,000 total. So, yeah. I'm definitely going to make the goal by my birthday in April. In fact, I might hit it this next writing session, depending on how everything goes. (Fingers crossed. Hitting my goal = eating out at a nice restaurant with the missus, which I love to do.) Today's work was broken into an inversion of the typical process, which happens so often that I guess it's not really an inversion at all. I try to do the narratological present chapter first, advancing the main plot before filling in back story. This is done for two reasons: 1) It makes more sense to write in the order that people read the story; 2) if a main chapter is too short, I can use the flashback to pull the word count up. Admittedly, if I write a flashback later, it still can pull up the word count, but I dislike l...

I got to write today, which makes it the last day of January in which I'll write. It also puts me squarely in the middle of a bizarre confluence of scheduling that will keep me away from the keyboard for another two weeks. See, the weirdest thing happened to me during this last month: I started to like a sport. This is an exceptionally strange occurrence, since I've never been interested in athleticism, though, to a certain extent, I'm still not actually involved with the sport. Instead, I've become the first-of-my-school Quidditch coach, something that I had not foreseen when I took on the Harry Potter and Philosophy Winterim. (It was during that Winterim that I wrote longhand on the plane, as I mentioned in the last post.) So now my time is split in yet another way. Because of that new interest, I will be doing my class on Saturday morning, then going up to see the Utah Snow Cup for the rest of that day. The following week will see me at UVU, but instead I'll be a...

This entry is a bit of a distortion, as I didn't actually write today. See, I wrote throughout parts of the plane ride that I took with a handful of students to Orlando, Florida, where we attended The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I hand wrote a new short story that takes place in Jajiin, with a Corathan girl who isn't a Poetess and her slave (which I called a Shadow, a term that I think I'll go ahead and put into the main book). What was worth remembering--and, because of that, worth writing the blog about--is that I hand wrote almost 3,000 words for the story on a plane. This is a major departure for me, as I almost never write anywhere but at my own home computer. After coming home, I transcribed and added a little to what I had originally written. I'm not sure where the story will go, but I know it's excellent background for what's going on concurrently with the events of my main book. That's all.

With a new year, I was hopeful that today would be exceptional productive. As I hiked up my 80 odd steps to the fourth floor, I was very positive that I would really get something great today. Turned out, it wasn't half bad. I was hopeful of getting more actually done--not even 3k words, and that includes something I wrote earlier but hadn't put it in yet. But what I got was, though a lot of dialogue, still pretty solid. I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that there's a lot of talking in my books. It's just how I think, it's how I conceive the transmission of information (that's one of the predominant ways of communication, after all, and I spend so much of my professional life talking, it's just part of who I am and how I write). I'm marching steadily toward my goal of 250,000 by April, and I'm thinking that, at this rate, I will be able to reach it sometime late February and perhaps early March. I do have some cluttered weekends, howe...