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Progress ... and a roadblock ahead
Jan. 9th, 2009 08:21 amI've been making great writing progress so far this January, which heartens me more than I can express. Typically, January has been a time when I enter the winter doldrums/post holiday lassitude, and my writing and confidence screech to an ugly halt. I think my daily writing goal of at least 100 words a day, every single day, can stand up and take a bow for my change in attitude this January. It's taught me that I do not have to feel the muse sitting on my shoulder in order to write, that I can write a pile of shit and worry about its flow later on, that its okay to take the story in a wrong direction because I can always go back and delete and rewrite, and a whole list of other things that are more subtle, but make themselves felt every day I sit to write. My enthusiasm for writing, which usually falls to zero in January and can take me many months to re-generate, is high. I've also been keeping better stats of my writing progress, which doesn't allow me to sit back and whine about how unproductive I am, nor to imagine that I have a gazillion rejections and no acceptances.
So far for January I have written 6847 words in 8 days of writing and finished a very rough first draft of a short story "Ghost Play." My daily word count has been 511 words, and the high 1016, and 4 of those 8 days, I have written over 1000 words.
About to block this writerly output are two things. One, I have finished said short story and must now start on the revising. This will undoubtedly result in a negative word count for the day as I will most likely be deleting more than I insert. I'm unsure what to do here, if I should start a new short story and write the 100 word minimum on it each day or do a daily writing exercise of some kind while I revise. I also think that if I use the track changes feature in word and delete using it, that my word count still includes those deleted words until I accept the change, so that means any words added will increase the word count, but those deledted will not decrease it. We'll see later today.
The other block upcoming is that I'm going to send my laptop in for repair. My warranty runs out next month, so this will be the last hurrah. Last year it went in for a fix because the USB port in the rear was loose. When it came back, the caps lock key was missing. I did find it later, and thought all along that it could be snapped back on. But when I bought new RAM, I found out the key top is broken. It's the caps lock, who uses it right? And I can still use it anyway. But my "o" key is also not working sometimes. Although, of course, today, it has only not worked once, with all these o's I've typed. But anyway, the geek guy who helped me with my RAm said they'd probably replace the keyboard to fix the broken caps lock key, so if I can get a new keyboard on a 4-yr-old laptop, I'd better go for it, right? But that means about a week to ten days with no laptop. Which means I may have to resort to writing longhand. I've proved twice now that I can do that, but it still leaves me worried. Plus we're going back to the coast next weekend and I probably won't have the thing back yet. If I would have called on Monday like I meant to, it would have been back by next Thurs. I think. But as is typical for me and phone calls, I waited until yesterday.
Sorry this is so long, I did not mean to ramble like this.
So far for January I have written 6847 words in 8 days of writing and finished a very rough first draft of a short story "Ghost Play." My daily word count has been 511 words, and the high 1016, and 4 of those 8 days, I have written over 1000 words.
About to block this writerly output are two things. One, I have finished said short story and must now start on the revising. This will undoubtedly result in a negative word count for the day as I will most likely be deleting more than I insert. I'm unsure what to do here, if I should start a new short story and write the 100 word minimum on it each day or do a daily writing exercise of some kind while I revise. I also think that if I use the track changes feature in word and delete using it, that my word count still includes those deleted words until I accept the change, so that means any words added will increase the word count, but those deledted will not decrease it. We'll see later today.
The other block upcoming is that I'm going to send my laptop in for repair. My warranty runs out next month, so this will be the last hurrah. Last year it went in for a fix because the USB port in the rear was loose. When it came back, the caps lock key was missing. I did find it later, and thought all along that it could be snapped back on. But when I bought new RAM, I found out the key top is broken. It's the caps lock, who uses it right? And I can still use it anyway. But my "o" key is also not working sometimes. Although, of course, today, it has only not worked once, with all these o's I've typed. But anyway, the geek guy who helped me with my RAm said they'd probably replace the keyboard to fix the broken caps lock key, so if I can get a new keyboard on a 4-yr-old laptop, I'd better go for it, right? But that means about a week to ten days with no laptop. Which means I may have to resort to writing longhand. I've proved twice now that I can do that, but it still leaves me worried. Plus we're going back to the coast next weekend and I probably won't have the thing back yet. If I would have called on Monday like I meant to, it would have been back by next Thurs. I think. But as is typical for me and phone calls, I waited until yesterday.
Sorry this is so long, I did not mean to ramble like this.
