Results of Ruminations

On Revision One of the things that has me most worried about this project, is the problem of over- and underwriting the whole thing. Obviously, I don't mean underwriting in any legal sense. No, what I mean is that there's a distinct fish-stick problem with my writing, and by that  I mean that I often feel that my writings are like fish-sticks: frozen on the inside and burned on the outside. It's supposed to balance out--in theory--but, in reality, it's just an unpalatable mess. This is something that I've struggled with since I was a really young writer. In fact, I have a distinct memory of breaking down into tears while I was in the midst of one of my earliest writing projects. It must've been during my 7th grade year, when I was working on one of my many Spider-Man novels. I had been slaving away on it at whatever rate I could (I wasn't nearly as obsessive about documenting and measuring my work back then as I am now), and the reality that the story s...

This afternoon, I headed toward UVU to start writing. Gayle had taken the boys, I was at leisure to begin writing.... ...So I went to Barnes and Noble instead. It wasn't that I wasn't keen to get writing--I kind of was. Yesterday was a fairly okay day, putting in the other half of the chapter I had started the day before. But it wasn't the sort of thing that's super inspiring and encouraging. Plus, I knew that I wasn't hungry enough to eat lunch right away, but I didn't have enough in my stomach to last me until the library closed at 5:00. With those thoughts in mind, I decided to browse a little bit before going to lunch, which turned out to be a mixed bag. The con side came in the fact that it was local author day at Barnes and Noble. I did the typical shopper thing--what I would surely dislike or downright despise if I ever became a local author--and glanced over their books and didn't engage any of them at all. Now, to be fair, there were quite a few...

Some work done today. I'm at UVU (thankfully), and it turned out to be a good thing. Yesterday, I went on about how saving stuff helps me later on, sometimes. Well, this time, it was my writers' group that helped. One of the readers is behind the forereaders of my book. Because of this, I'm able to look a little further back than what I normally get to do. This time, it was super fortuitous: All of the stuff I talked about yesterday (with reusing previously crafted stuff) I had already done about thirty chapters before. Not all of it was used in the earlier chapter, so I was able to salvage the work of yesterday and tighten it up a little bit, but it was a good lesson in showing why I can't rely on my memory from stuff that I wrote back in February for what I'm working on now. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I do when it comes to writer's block. The opening line of Henry V is very much my prayer (though not often literal): "O for a Muse o...

Today's writing was unexpected. Originally, I had a full day of writing planned. Then cleaning the house jumped in. Then lunch with a friend came up. Then a visit to the doctor's office for a delayed 18-month check up on Jeremy intervened. So a day full of writing turned into a late afternoon filled with writing, complete with inability to go to the preferred writing nook of UVU library. Instead, I stayed at home and, bravely, tackled the keyboard, even though my immediate feeling of being able to write had severely diminished. Nevertheless, I managed to pound out a little less than 2,000 words--which leads me to the documentation of today. See, I'll write something and keep it--unless it's a small little phrase or spelling error or something, I save all of my false starts and random tangents. You just never know what might be useful later. That's the case for today. Long ago (back on 17 Jan 2011, to be precise), I wrote a partial chapter in which Saldrae ta...

Two days ago was my 7th year anniversary, so, in honor of my spectacular wife, I wanted to record another piece of the history of Writ in Blood  that points to how instrumental she is in my writing. How I Write See, writing when one has a full time job is something that I have never been able to do. I give a great deal of effort to wherever it is that I'm employed, and I really put a lot of my energy into the daily grind. I don't think that's unique in any way. I'm just pointing out that I rarely have the capacity or stamina to keep working beyond the typical hours of the work day. So I need copious amounts (between 4 and 5 hours) of free time on Saturdays to get my writing done. Because I'm putting so much effort into wordsmithing, I can't really be distracted. Having two little boys of four and one and a half makes it, essentially, impossible to be around them and not get distracted. Jeremy will climb onto my lap and shove his adorable little face in fr...

Shoved in between a couple of sessions of General Conference, I managed to slam out just over two thousand words in Writ in Blood , a nice accomplishment done solely because Jeremy was asleep and Gayle had taken Peter to Target. The silence of the house allowed me to concentrate well enough to get the flashback done. That leads me to what I wanted to document today: The form of my novel. When I first started this behemoth (as it's turning out to be), I was watching the first season of Lost . While I've enjoyed what pieces of the show I've been able to watch (stopping some point early on in Season Two), part of what really grabbed me was the way in which the characters' stories were revealed. Lost  is set up with a handful of main characters. Each episode focuses on one specifically. During "the narratological present", the characters work together (or not) and advance the mystery of the island. Punctuating the narratological present they have flashbacks, w...