Writing and Work

Zaphod the cute -- and that should say 2007, not 2006!

Hello everyone!

I was going to do snippets last Friday but the time just got away from me again. It's been a far-too-busy couple weeks. I have the feeling it's going to stay that way, too. Things have been piling up, and I have to fight to get it done -- and fight with a really bad 'who cares' attitude I developed there for a while. I'm still fighting that one off.

The one thing that has been helping is to give myself even more work. (Laughs) I decided that I'm tired of not getting much done in writing, so I've been doing 4k a day now for eleven days. That's helped with the word count. It's also gotten A Plague of Rats far closer to the ending. In fact, I'm starting to worry about what I'll write between it and NaNo.

Not so oddly, now that I've thrown myself into the novel again, the writing is going well on it. It's worse when I only do a few hundred words because I never get fully immersed into the story, and then it's harder to come back to it the next time. It slips away, bit-by-bit. It's especially bad when I'm writing something without an outline. Every time I hit that point, I remember why I like outlines so well.

But, even so, the story is moving. I'll have it done soon enough, and then move on to something new. Maybe short stories and nonfiction work for a few weeks. I could stand to do both. And I can work on outlines, of course. I have a couple of those ready to go, and I hope to fill them out a little more before NaNo.

I thought about not doing NaNo this year, but Russ talked me into it. There were a number of reasons I wasn't going to, including attitudes of others and a massive amount of work that doesn't appear to be lessening any. The attitudes shouldn't bother me, of course, and when it comes time for NaNo, they don't. At other times, I find it annoying that people think we should all do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason -- and this from supposed writers. I say 'supposed' because now that I think about it, the ones I usually hear from are the ones who never complete a NaNo at all, and rarely -- if ever -- write anything else. And they're looking for someone (other then themselves) to blame.

And you know, I've just realized that I've inspired more people to write precisely because I show how much I love it during NaNo than any of the people will ever do with their constant griping about the fact that I write fast, and I love it.

Sometimes it's important to look at the larger picture.

And tonight's larger picture says that I had better stop messing around and get to work on my real writing before it gets any later!