10-26-09 Did You Write?

10-26-09 Did You Write?

Sound the alarms, batten down the hatches. The day you all dread has arrived. It is time to announce to the world, whether you applied yourself and wrote, or you had a confrontation with life and life won. Stand up and tell the world about your accomplishments. Stand up and tell the world about your failures. Otherwise tell the world what is going on in your life.

We all know that anything new you write, whether it is a paragraph of a dozen pages, is writing. We must remember that anything we edit, even if it is the work of others, is writing also. Poetry is writing, so is writing assignments, blogging, technical writing, article writing. World or character development is also writing, especially if it gets on paper. E-mails can be writing too, if they are very wordy and pertain to story or writing. There are others that can be writing, as long as you decide it is writing. Some of these might not be writing to you. It is really just your decision.

AS for me. Yes, I did write. for me, I really did write. I added four pages to my story, all new scenery, and then zapped two pages of the previous verison that I no longer needed. Even with that, I added two pages, 1327 words. AS I mentioned, I zapped two pages. I should have did a word count before I zapped, as I removed them when I was about to do my word count, but I did not. As it is, the story is now at page 60.
I finished the scene where one of the main characters was hunting. I fired that off to my writing partner. She said I had it. I just needed to add more dread and do some editing and would have it perfect. I will try to fix that on the next edit run. I am giddy that it worked. It was actually her idea on how to save this scene that was about to stop the story.
I finished, roughly, the next new set of scenes. I will punch it up on the next pass through. The story will essentially be four more scenes. The writing ahead of where I am working will not be used, but it is there to remind me of what I want to do.
This was a fun week of writing. It would be great if all weeks were like this, but then reality sets in. One has to get up from the computer and do something else.

On the story idea front, I have 42 story ideas in my compost pile. I have not been coming up with very many ideas lately.
On the ends of many of these DYW posts, I convert my activities into possible story idea presentations. I have known that some of these were really good, but had left them alone. I save these notes in files since the start of 2008. It dawned on me that I could dig into those presentations and rewrite them as full story ideas. I have done eight of them so far.
I see a lot of them are very close to the same thing, but there are some good ones in there. My new story idea presentations are more complete, better developed, but still story ideas. Many times, I offered several options on how to use the concept and my new presentation was just one of them. You can see where these come from, but they are different. If I were to create a finished story from either concept, it would not look the same either.
The interesting thing is that I cut and paste the text into the work I am writing, and not one word is copied into the finished piece. It is always that different, or not worth the effort.
I look at all my story ideas the same way. If Twenty people were to write the stories from one story idea, they would end up with twenty different stories.

I am in a project of trying to consolidate some stuff in my house and get rid of things. On weekends, we go to yard sales or garage sales (tag sales in some areas) in my mom's community. She is looking for Christmas presents. I am just looking for things that catch my eye.
Anyway, I have run into the problem where I am bringing more home than I am tossing out. It gets a bit frustrating. Of course, one person's junk is another person's treasure. I am lucky. I have learned that a lot of things I would have gotten because I thought it would be of use later, or just wanted to have, are no longer interesting. I either have it, or know I will never use it. I walk away from a lot of treasures that way.

My mom was not happy with me. I ended up with more wood. If I chose the project according to the wood I have, I would have five years worth of wood. When I choose the wood according to the project I want to do, I don't have the right kind of wood, and therefore feel like I don't have any wood at all.
The pieces I selected are perfect for some very large projects I am considering. I just have to decide which projects take precedence.
One thing was that the tree the wood was from, was dead for a while. One piece of wood had an ant colony inside. pealed the bark off which was already loose, and then brushed the dust and ants off into a pile. They got swept up and stuck in the dirt pile mom uses for her potted plants. I don't think they liked how they were handled. I did a couple quite projects with some of the wood and it looks great.

Using the above as a story idea, he gets shipments of material from other environments, or even other worlds. He is in an isolated location, a space station, that is an old garden, abandoned long ago. He moved in and took over. He brings in materials to work with and there are sometimes pests still living in the material. He simply cleans the material and dumps it into a compost bin. It is filled near the top. There is an auger that moves slowly at the bottom that will empty the bin in a year. Pests, weeds, chopped debris all go into the bin and it has a way of eliminating any pests.
One shipment has some "bugs" in it. He treats them the same way. They are not normal bugs, but have "magical" powers and are very intelligent. they are ticked at their treatment and decide to get revenge. They escape the bin and start making his life miserable, gremlins in essence.

AS to the question of the day,
I am proud to say,
Yes, I did write.


DID YOU WRITE?