08-31-2009 Did You Write?

08-31-2009 Did You Write?

It is the end of a week, and is also the end of the month. This is the time and place to brag about your accomplishment, cry about your failures, and to otherwise tell about what is going on in your life.
Many of us won't write regularly without some prodding. We will write for a while, then get onto other things, going weeks, or even months without writing, then picking it up again.
The concept of this note is to give myself, and you, a weekly prompt to get to write something, anything, during the week and th en report how much or little you did. The hope is that you will also report that you did not write, so you have an incentive to get to work.
We all know this is coming each Monday, so the hope is that you will get yourself to open one of your works in progress just so you can report you did not drag society down to such low depths by not being productive again (that is how I feel when I post this without any production. Think of it, If I wrote as much in my works in progress as I put into this note each week, I would be doing really good).

WE always get questions about what is writing and what is not. Any of your projects, even if it is not your main project, counts. You wrote. That is what counts.
Anything new we write, is writing. We all can agree with that. Also, any editing we do counts as writing, even if it is the work of someone else. We cannot write a new piece perfectly, so we all have to edit. Editing is really more about writing than the original draft.
I also include poetry, technical articles, blogging, school writing assignments as writing. Character development and world building is writing, but I prefer to require that something get on paper. I have been known to plot out a story in detail, then realize I was just daydreaming since the first words changes the story.
E-mails can be writing too, as long as they are wordy and pertain to writing or a story. Other items can be writing or some of these might not be writing. It all depends on how you set your own definitions.

AS for me. I did write. I have worked on expanding and improving my Waxy Birth Story. I swapped several of my scenes around, in a plot change my writing partner pointed me to. That requires a lot more writing to be done. I am also fleshing out scenes I just touched on. That did some expansion. This week, I took the story from page 28 to page 31, in heavy editing.
I zapped a lot of text in the process of building it up. I added almost six hundred words to the story with all that I zapped. I have no idea how much I zapped, but could have easily have written half again those words this week.
What I have to do is to add whole sections of actions and scenery in the next parts of the story. I am now looking at fifty or sixty pages when done.
One thing I am doing is setting up the rest of the 60+ stories I already have written. A lot that is suggested in the later stories are pointed to directly here. I am also fixing many of the rules the later stories needed to work.


I finished this month's story ideas tonight. I posted 31 story ideas, one for each day, and ended on Page 49, with a total of 29,992 words.
I have 39 story ideas in my concept compost pile right now. I seam to get as many story ideas I need, keeping the depth of the compost pile about the same level. There is something about gaining a deeper compost pile that is kind of satisfying. It shows that my mind is working faster than the keyboard.
Usually, the un-post-able concepts don't grow fast, mainly because I am posting the concepts rapidly. what might not seam usable right now, may spark my fancy today. The concept I posted tonight, was something I got from a discussion while visiting my writing partner back in July. Today, It just sounded like the right concept to post and it got written.
There are two things I can say about my story ideas. One, if I put all this effort into one piece, I could write several novel rough drafts in a year.
The other is that in many ways, this is more fun. I get to come up with a brilliant concept, get the excitement of starting a new project, and receive the satisfaction of finishing it, all within a couple hours of writing. What is more, is that I don't have to edit the piece unless I choose to turn it into a finished piece, which I have done over the years. The Waxy Dragon story I am rewriting, was once a story idea.

I am in the process of reorganizing my office. I have learned and forgotten in the past, that any time you start moving furniture around, little storage spaces are disrupted and that stuff gets piled up in boxes and on the floor to get them out of the way.
I have most of the papers of every story Idea I have written since I started. Right now, they are in coffee single boxes. I figured out that if I flatten the papers, instead of having them balled up like many are in the boxes, I can save a tremendous amount of space. I have between 120 and 150 boxes of idea, each one is a month of posted concepts, laying around. I need to condense them to save some room and get them out of the way, but that takes time that could better be used on the computer work such as writing. Decisions, decisions.
Actually, I really should toss them. They can be tossed at any time the need arises, so holding off is a better decision at this second. The moment they are tossed, they can never be retrieved. If the decision is wrong, it could bring up a lot of regret.
I almost have my third computer set up. It is a 486/33 that can run some key programs my more modern computers don't like at all. It can also read disks that are not available in anything else around. I had lost a lot of files that are on the disks I cannot read now.
The big thing I did with my rearrangement is to give myself more room with the furniture I had. Just turning a hutch around gave me a new computer station.

For a story idea based on moving things around, She received a couple pieces of furniture. She was told that they were spelled to be useful. She simply shrugged.
she set it up in her room. A bit later, she decides to change it. As she is moving them, she finds there are pieces she did not notice before. By swinging the new pieces out, she has more furniture, a bigger desk.
Later, she moves her furniture and finds there was a hutch there. She was positive it was not there before. She sets that up and it is nice.
Over time, she has to pack the furniture up for a move. she carefully places each piece back where she got it, wondering how they are going to be moved. the furniture is picked up as the original pieces she had, and placed into the new home. When she unpacks the furniture, they have doubled from what she had at the old place.
Eventually, the house has that furniture all through the house and little else. That is when she realizes what was meant that it was spelled to be useful. It grows and shrinks with each move, depending on how she arranges things in her house. .

As to the question of the week, I can say

YES, I DID WRITE.


DID YOU WRITE?