Results of Ruminations

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...

As the (most likely) last post of the year (woot? It's kinda like, "Oh, last one of the year!" and then, when the new year comes, it's really just a continuation, so what's the hubbub?) I'll make this one relatively brief...I think. Today's writing went off well, then not so well, then embarrassing, then it's time to go home. In order: I got to the library pretty early, and the first chapter that I wrote came across all right. I'm not one hundred percent disappointed in it, but, while it began well, the chapter seemed to drag for all 2800 or so words. The problem came from the same issue that I really struggled with in Words of the Silence  (and I may have reference in an early post): I pack so much exposition into dialogue that I just don't know what to do with myself. I amn't pleased with the way that my chapters tend to do one thing or another--people either sit around and talk a lot, or they get in fights. Like, really, that's all...

I wrote unexpectedly today, which is always nice when it happens. I have to admit, though, I would've preferred my typical routine to what I went through today. Because of scheduling hiccups, car troubles, and holiday hours at UVU library, I ended up doing my writing at the in-laws' house. Normally, I really enjoy being with my in-laws. They're incredibly supportive of me and mine, and my mother-in-law's a great cook to boot. But writing with the little boys scampering about is, generally, a losing proposition. Mix into that hectic mix trips down to the dealership (car troubles), skipping lunch (scheduling hiccups), and an overall difficulty in keeping my quiet corner quiet (holiday hour lamentations), it's a small miracle I produced as much as I did. Today, instead of progressing the story forward--which, after pausing over the Christmas weekend, now has a bit of direction--I decided to move back to the approximate middle of the story and give some extra detail...

I'll be brief today: It was 'productive' in that I produced almost 3,100 words. It was a chapter that I am extremely disappointed in, and it marks the crucial juncture of having run out of track that I lay in front of the oncoming train and the oncoming train catching up to me. I have no idea where to go from here, and the conversation that my characters just went through for the last 3k words is not that worthwhile. This happens to me frequently. I remember this occurring during Words of the Silenced  when I sent the main character down south to investigate the scene of the regicide. It sidetracked by about, oh, six chapters I think, before I pulled it back and reasserted it. Then, in the second draft, I further axed the scene, shifting it from the south to the east and modifying other aspects as I went along. The current version definitely works better, though there are still some glaring issues with that book, few of which have to do with what I'm talking about her...

Today and yesterday proved surprisingly productive in that I was not expecting to produce anything, so what I did put out was completely unplanned. Yesterday's work came thanks to a fortuitous double nap that the boys performed in the middle of the day. I had the tickling of a scene--nothing truly developed, and, because of that, nothing truly remarkable--that I had considered as being worthwhile adding in. I decided to provide a flashback for Nicomachus that stretched back all the way to when he and his brother, Dalinus, were young. Because I hadn't planned on writing, it wasn't rendered quite as well as I would have preferred, but I squeezed it out and slapped it in. Fiddling with yWriter 5 (my writing program of choice; see below), I dropped the flashback into an already overloaded chapter, thinking that it wouldn't make too big of a difference. After doing that, I immediately regretted the choice: The chapter was over  6,000 words. (I know giving a word count i...