Monday, March 28, 2011

Did You Write? 03-28-11

Did You Write? 03-28-11

It is that time of the week again. You report what happened in your life this week whether you wrote or not, and then tell about your writing or why not. To have to report that you did not write is intended to be an incentive to actually open your work in progress, and hopefully do something with it.

How much counts as writing can be anywhere from one word to thousands. Opening your work is most important.
We don't care if it is something old or brand new. new writing is always thought of as writing, but so is editing, even if it is the work of someone else. Critiquing is also editing. When editing one might be adding content or cutting something back to publication size. We have all had times where we edited something, going through a number of pages, deleting passages and adding new, and end up with near the same word count. Word count during editing does not matter.
Poetry, writing assignments, blogging, article writing, technical writing, world or character creation are all writing. Even E-mails can be writing if they are wordy and pertain to story or writing. If you have to ask if it is writing, our answer is yes.

As for me, I working through an edit of my first Waxy story for the editor. I started out at 41 pages with all the comments. I am eliminating comments as I make the changes and am down to page 28 of what is now 40 pages. Some scenes require some thought or work but others flow rapidly. Right now, I am in the middle of a major change in the story, eliminating some bothersome sections while making it work. One change here effects other things. During my last editing session, I stopped when it got tough.

On the story idea front, New ideas started appearing again. I am at 45 story ideas, not counting what I am posting tonight, and the top few of those are good new ideas.

On woodworking, I should finish my second fairy next weekend. My main project is making a base for her. She is painted and has her wings, and the king frog is made and painted. I have to create the base so it looks good, which will require some more mushrooms which I will make on the lathe.
I found out that I am not a carpenter. Mom needed a frame to hold some stuff up off the carpet in case of a leak. I measured carefully and cut carefully and yet my creation was not square. It did not help that the batteries of my battery powered drill refused to hold a charge, and the switch of the electric drill decided to not work in reverse and struggle in the normal direction. It also did not help that I was told AFTER IT WAS DONE, a tip that would have made it a whole lot easier.
If I did it again, I might do it better. I had the right concepts, but execution is not there.

For a story idea, you have a bunch of people who are program-educated. All the knowledge of mankind is pumped into their brains. they are then sent to a new site to build a colony of their own.
The problem is that while they have knowledge, they were never given the skills. There is knowledge one cannot gain unless you do it and you learn by doing it wrong. They have limited resources, the people who set up the project presumed the youngsters would do things as master workers would so they did not allow for a lot of mistakes.
The colony is built, but nothing like the designers expected because of a loss of supplies during the learning process. by the time the youngsters mastered the basic skills their "book knowledge" was fading away.

As for me, I can honestly say

YES I DID WRITE


DID YOU WRITE?

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