An update...

I'm not doing so good in updating this blog, but here's one.
I've finally found a copy of a short story I wrote about two years ago. I found it on the back-up, stand alone, hard disk we have. Thank the lord for back ups. I'm going to submit this story to magazines etc. and see if anyone wants to publish it. I'm going to start with paying markets first and go down from there. :)

My new, desk-top computer is up and running and it is on this computer that I have put the story. I will put it onto a USB stick just as soon as I have one with some space. I have also re-installed yWriter5 on to this computer.

I have a nasty habit of using my desk top computer for games and I tend to pick playing games over writing. I also own a netbook, which I only use for writing. The idea is that I move the story to the netbook, re-read it, edit as necessary and then submit it for publication.

My work computer is dying, so at the moment the entire contents of its hard drive are on a variety of USB sticks and portable hard drives. Hence I have no space available for the story. (Though having said that and while editing this post, I found a small USB stick, which does have space. So tonight the story gets moved.) I will be getting a new, work laptop in a week or two.

I've started to make a new schedule for writing and I'm actually doing some. Not a lot, but it's a start. I need to get into the habit of writing and that habit needs to be substainable.

I need to move the files around. For NaNoWriMo, I kept the files on a USB stick, but now I want to concentrate on using my netbook and not to write at work if at all possible. Therefore I will copy all the files on to the netbook.

One publication I'm going to check out is 'The New Yorker', because if I'm going to be rejected, I want to be rejected by the best.

And I keep getting sick, which means I'm tired all the time. At the moment a normal day is wake-up, eat, go to work, get home, eat and sleep. Repeat for all working days. I'm starting to feel a bit better - touch wood.

My typing is much worse. I don't seem to be able to 1) put my hands in the right rest positions on the keyboard and 2) hit the right keys when typing. I always seem to be a letter or two off or I press too many of the right key.

Practice make perfect. Now all I need to do is practice.

Yesterday

Things went bad at work yesterday, so I got absolutely nothing written.

I'm glad it didn't happen before yesterday, otherwise I would have been much lower on my NaNoWriMo total. So there won't be much happening on the writing front until I get this mess cleared up.

Time to try shifting my writing to evenings and weekends.

It's over

So NaNoWriMo is over for another year. Congratulations if you won! I'm more statisfied with my writing this year than ever before and I seemed to have picked up a writing habit in the process.

I wonder how long it will last. Anyway time to go write another scene.

Plot of character? How is your writing driven?

I actually started off writing about inspiration, but I got sidetracked, so I decided to leave that for another day and write about plot versus character instead. Below is what I wrote...

I have thousands of ideas floating around in my head, some of which I write down. These are plots or people by prototypes, which can be expanded as needed. Part of this is due to how I write. I always start off with characters and the plot develops from there.

I find if I have interesting characters, I never have to make things happen, they will occur on their own. In fact, if I get stuck at all I put some or all of my characters in a room and see what happens.

For example, in my NaNoWriMo outline for this year, I started off with a character similar to one I had read about in a news story. It was about a man who's dead body had been lying for months in his flat. Not an unusual story except that the man had not been a recluse. He was in fact an obnoxious weirdo, who was disliked by everyone including he own family.

Most of the neighbours assumed he had been rehoused by the council, His family weren't talking to him and didn't really make a huge effort to contact him. It was only when a workman needed access to the flat to fix a leak that his body was discovered.

This started me thinking about all the horrible people I know and the victim of my NaNoWriMo was born, well died. She, in fact, starts off dead. But her nastiness leads to all sorts of possibilities and without her needing to go over the top in any of her actions. This gives me a large pool of suspects. It's a murder mystery in case you were wondering.

Everything I've written has always started with one or more characters. It's the only way I seem to be able to write. Last year I tried starting with a plot. I did write the 50 000 words, but it was a slog and not one I want to repeat. The result is incredibly bland. There aren't any plot holes, as in my other attempts, but it will send you to sleep quickly.

It's been a very long time...

since I last posted. I went on holiday and did all the usual stuff, but the one thing I didn't do was write. Yesterday that changed.

For some weird and wonderful reason I thought NaNoWriMo was October - stupid I know. Of course it's November. However I had a slight panic attack when I thought it was only a couple of weeks away and I hadn't even thought about what to write.

My exact thought was 'I have no plot or even a single character...maybe that will work...damn complicated though...might work...let's see' and I started to write. OK not a huge amount, just a few hundred words, but it's more than I written in months.

I don't know why I stopped writing. Probably it was because it just seemed like too much trouble. By the end of the last school year I was getting very tired and stressed. Not a real excuse, but I think the break has done me some good.

What it all amounts to is a very complicated plot for NaNoWriMo, which will span 80 years, with five or six separate stories that will weave in and out of each other. Did I mention it's complicated. I have no idea if it'll work, but if it does it could be the best thing I've ever written.

Should be fun to find out. So back to writing the plot summary, which will be in the form of a time line spanning the eighty odd years that the book will span. The actual book will not follow the time line, but the stories will be revealed in flashbacks. Maybe flashbacks is not the right word, still the actual story line will move back and forth through the time line.

Hi, ho, hi, ho, it's off to write we go...

An update

I haven't been here for a while. A death followed by a health scare meant I just didn't have the energy to update the blog. Sorry.

Now all of that is over and I'm sort of catching up at work, so it is time to get back to writing or at least writing about not writing. I have my story. I know what's wrong with what I have written. Now all I need to do is make it right....

This should be interesting. I am attempting to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it is only for 5 minutes or so. I would love to write for an hour a day, but I'm not going to run before I can walk.

So time to finish the urgent stuff for work and then I will write. At least one sentence...

Tuesday's report

I forgot to write in my diary yesterday. I think I need to have it with me so I can write in it when I have the time or the inclination, rather than leaving it at home to write in it at 6pm.

However, I did write. I wrote a piece, which is part of my "novel" and I am using as a writing exercise. I'm trying a new way to create scenes. Hopefully it will work, but only time will tell. This method fits in well with my current writing style, so it's not like I have to make big changes. I will however have to go through my current draft and split it up differently and work on the individual parts. This is not a bad thing.

If I can get the individual parts to work, then I can put them back together and make the whole thing work. Well that's the plan anyway.

Writing habits

For the last 10 days or so, I have been writing. Each session has produced 500-750 words, which is pretty good. Last week I managed 2900 words in total and so far this week the total has increased to 4500 words.

I did start off with the goal of 100 words a day, or 700 words for the entire first week, so I blew that goal completely out of the water. As I completed almost 3000 words last week, my new goal for this week is 3500 words to give a total of 6500 over the two weeks. Only 2000 words to go...

In terms of progress on the novel, I would like to get to 5000 words a week. This is eminently doable, but as always it is me that is holding it back. So far this week, I'm not doing too badly. Last night I was ill so I didn't write, I slept instead. However I have no excuse for tonight.

I should add that I was seriously ill at the end of last week due to a viral infection. The doctor was worried it was even worse than it turned out to be, but I was still very sick. I'm still feeling the effects now and that is why I slept for so long yesterday.

I will admit that this is a new story I'm writing. I decided to take some time away from the other one as I was getting more and more confused where it was headed. I haven't completely abandoned it and I will go back to it when I've finished writing the first draft of this story. At that point I will then make a decision as to either continue with it or abandon it for good.

Of course I could be a serial first drafter, never getting any further with anything, but somehow I doubt it.

Habits

I no longer write every day. I've managed to drop the habit and I am having some trouble trying to get it back. So yesterday I decided that I would not go to bed until I had written at least 100 words, with a goal to write a minimum of 100 words a day for the whole week.

The idea is to increase that to 200 words a day for the following week. And each week, up the daily total by a hundred, stopping at either 500 or 1000 words a day. I like the idea of 1000 words a day, but I need to see how practical it is to do.

And being practical, I have to allow for some days with no writing. Sometimes it won't be possible. But I could write extra on the days that follow, which I think is probably the best idea so that the week total remains unchanged.

This is, of course, more difficult if I go for 7000 words a week, but not impossible. I manage much more than that during NaNoWriMo. I'm just not sure it's realistic over such a long period. For 3500 words a week, it would be much easier.

So last night I sat down and wrote. In the end I had 1073 words, which is not bad. Tonight I still have my goal of a minimum of 100 words, but hopefully I will again write more. I'm going to force myself to write everyday until I have finished a draft.

Let's see what happens this time.

Update day nine.

Well today went very well. Much better than I ever expected it to. I actually wrote almost 5000 words without much effort at all.

I think that this lower day goal I have set myself is working. I'm not spending my time worrying about whether or not I can write 5k words. I just write.

So my total for today is 28360 words and the story is going smoothly. I am more almost two-thirds of the way through the storyline, but much less than that on the word count. I am not worried, because I know that when I finish the storyline, there are plenty of scenes to go back to where I can add detail or change things from telling to showing.

I deliberately skipped over some scenes because I didn't want to write them at that time, but that means I can easily up my word count. I think that there are some scenes that are also missing. I have added a few already. I will go back over the beginning of the story and add a few extra there.

Overall it's been a good day. The words came easily and I wrote a lot of them. Let's see if this continues tomorrow.

Day Four Update

Well I made it to 20k words. I acutlly took my total to 20011 owrds. Not bad at all. Yesterday was a good day. The writing was much easier than Tuesday's.

Not much else to say. Except that I might change my word goal at the end of the week. At the moment I am trying to write 5000 words a day, with the goal of reaching 30000 words by the end of Friday. This is a lot of writing in a day onto of my regular work. So starting next week, I'm going to change my goal slightly.

I'm going to have 2 goals - a minimum goal and a "would-be-nice-to-get-to" (wbntgt) goal. The minimum I want to write in one day is 2500 words, which is still more than the NaNoWriMo minimum. And my wbntgt goal is 5000 words per day as I have been doing this week, but I'm not going to go to extremes to get there.

I believe that the result of this, will be a more balanced writing habit that I can continue to use after NaNoWriMo. At the moment, I find the balance completely wrong so that I find I'm not sleeping well and my hands are killing me from all the typing. Of course, if I ever give up my job, I will spend more hours writing. But for now, less is more.

I will probably change my mind next week and then again the week after and so on, until I find something that works for me and that I can use in my everyday life.

So time to write today's 5000 words and get a total of 25k words.

I hope everyone else is doing well and acheiving their own goals. Good luck to you all.