I definitely need to get my butt in gear. I have to put in 10000 hours to become a master at writing and sidestepping the work will not get it done any faster. Thanks Mur Lafferty for yet another swift kick right when I need it the most!
More later
All for now, Later!
1PM
Topping this week’s to do list is setting my goals. Some might call it cliché but I have so many awesome ideas and projects that I need to organize them. Break them down into manageable parts. More and more I’m finding that if I don’t list, organize and break the ideas down I thrash about and never finish any of them. None followed through with as I imagined. So I have to start keeping track. Scoring and rating myself. Being accountable. Wandering from idea to idea without finishing any will get you somewhere. But not the somewhere that I want to go. I’ll get further if I finish each idea that I start and move forward from each completion to the next great idea.
The boys haven’t been doing much writing lately but what do you expect, neither have I. I try not to be a total hypocrite. If I’m not writing daily how can I expect them to. I’ll have to see where blogging falls in my list of goals and priorities. It is writing so I feel that it will be near the top of the list.
All for now,
Later!
1PM
Wow Thursday again already. Time is flying by. At least I’m back writing again. The ego keyboard is much less satisfying to type away on. There is also the whole learning to touch-type a new layout. Yes the new layout would be great ands yes touch-typing would increase my speed and word count. But I was waiting until I had it right before doing work. In other words I was just using learning to type as a novel way to procrastinate. The whole save my hands and type faster are meaningless if I am not typing. I will learn them when I need to not in preparation of needing to. There is noting that can teach you to write other than writing. I mean can you imagine taking classes on the theory of walking. Then all the physics of it. When you’ve learned everything about walking you will be old and your bones and muscles will have atrophied to uselessness. SO just do it. If you quit after X number of tries at walking then you would never walk. Isn’t it interesting that most of the people in the world who are physically able to walk do walk? What about talking? Again you keep trying until you get it right. People can talk, walk, drive and dance all of these tasks are complex just as writing well is. It is urgency, priority and desire that drive the learning.
All for now,
Later 1PM
Well I’ve worked on writing a story a week for the past couple of weeks and haven’t finished anything. Rather odd, the more I push with writing the fewer stories I finish. Oh, I get words in a row, just nothing finished. Maybe I should write another style of story. The outline of Twins has the rip out and eat the heart of the villain scene. I have some ideas for scenes that are a bit more intimate. Intimacy and gore in the same scene can create tension. I’ll have to think about it and see what I come up with.
I got the boys started on the story a week schedule. The first stories that they did that were 1002, 1008 and 1043 words respectively. They spent Saturday writing their stories. So I changed rules little bit. They need to write a couple of hundred words each day with a 1400-word a week minimum. They waited until Wednesday because “we forgot”. I’ve been reminding them to three times a day. They forget 12 reminders, but memorized a private late night conversation I had with my wife about a convention. That’s what I call focused selective memory.
I discovered that when I’m in public I’m self-conscious about writing using technology. A good example is right now. I’m writing this longhand while my Alphasmart and laptop are the in bag under my chair. But no hesitation to write away longhand. My mind hand connection is much stronger this way than it is with typing. It’s funny. The pain is I have to get this into the computer. I think I’ll use voice-recognition for transcription. Then typing for editing and polishing. I need to work on my handwriting if I’m going to work this way though.
All for now,
Later!
1PM
Well the two older boys have finished with their formatting. One is has about 27000 the other about 4000. I’ve printed out the stories. They are reading each others at the moment. That will let them see the problems with the stories. I haven’t read through either story yet. The parts I’ve looked at are reasonable. They need tightening and clarifying to fix most issues. With a dose of fact checking tossed in for good measure. Both are Star Wars based so there are plenty of resources, like wookiepedia.
The projects at the day job have been sucking the creativity right out of me. I’ve completed the critical ones so I get the flow back. I need to work on some reviewing and editing that I promised some people. The typing is moving along. My speed is enough to let me do this post with dvorak. If I’m flow writing I still have to go with qwerty, for the speed. I need to work on writing with distractions. That has been my bane recently. Allowing my desk to be a mess doesn’t help either. Time to clean the desk and work out a schedule for the odds and ends that I need to do!
All for now. Later!
1PM