Enough with the transitions – another Open Mic week has arrived! Talk amongst yourselves while I try to reduce the level of clutter in the office…
Enough with the transitions – another Open Mic week has arrived! Talk amongst yourselves while I try to reduce the level of clutter in the office…
Chapter 3 of my webcomic started today! The main characters have just arrived at the courtyard they’re supposed to draw as part of their project of mapping the city, but the residents of said courtyard (an extended family of anthropomorphic rodent people) aren’t entirely on board with it.
http://theshiftingcity.the-comic.org/comics/44
I think I mentioned last open mic that I wrote an entire novel in 70-odd days, which is insanely fast for me.
Pandemic isolation then pushed me to write another in only 35 days. I don’t have that kind of speed + stamina anymore!
Fortunately, I’ve gotten both my vaccination shots, and in a few more days, I can return to something resembling normal life. Good thing, too, another novel like that would probably cause me something chronic.
I’ve been “Showing up at the page every day” since mid December as an early New-Year’s resolution, with a file to keep track of those days when I *didn’t* show up. Knock wood that I can keep going without too many entries into that file.
Right now I’m in one of my “Rewrite from the beginning once I’m in the middle” episodes that’s part of my process when I do a novel. This time it’s more of a slog than usual due to some structural changes that were bigger than they looked.
I mentioned this at the April open mic, and as an administrivia request, maybe the open mic posts can be given an “Open Mic” tag to make them easier to find?
I’ve also been wanting to do a short story in a completely different setting as a change of pace, but I’ve been having my all-too-common problem of “Must. Find. Plot.” The plot-skeleton can be pretty skeletal, but I need a beginning-bone, a middle bond, and an ending bone (which I still say is the skull: The part of the plot that gives it bite).
I’ve been showing up at the page but not, alas, the SAME page. It interferes with getting things done.
I have *not* been showing up at the page much (at all) lately, and I’m trying to decide if that’s good or bad. I want to get this expletive-deleted book Done, and that won’t happen without hands on keyboard… but I think I might need a break. And since I’m still fretting over the *last* book, which I pushed to get done even though I didn’t have quite what I wanted for the ending, maybe letting things percolate for a bit isn’t the worst option.
I did buckle down and get a bunch of short stories sent out, which is the one thing I’m worse at doing consistently than writing. So there’s that.
Not about writing, *exactly.*
Slate online magazine’s Care and Feeding column today has a letter about a six-year-old who listens to audiobooks all day.
“During quarantine, our family memorized the entire Ramona Quimby series as well as the entire Enchanted Forest Chronicles ”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/teacher-looks-really-young-parents.html
It’s the second letter in the column.
Catch ’em young!
A grine. (That a grumble and whine, and a complaint about grinding.)
Writing new scenes to insert, and massive rewrites of existing scenes, as part of my stop-and-rewrite-while-in-the-middle, has been slow and sticky. I’m reminded why “Write separate scenes, then string them together like beads” is such an alien process for me.