12-27-10 Did You Write?

12-27-10 Did You Write?

It is that time of the week again, the time to report how you did this week. Many among us struggle to write three times a year, let alone once a week or every day. Life loves to get into the way of writing. There are times when life cannot be held off long enough to open a project.
This note is to allow you to brag about your accomplishments, cry about your failures, and otherwise tell about what is going on in your life.
By reporting what happened, even if you failed to write, this note provides a prompt, an incentive to open something up even if there is to write a couple words or change a sentence. The idea is to try to develop a habit to write regularly, which could eventually result in writing "The End" on a project. The writing each week might bring forth a project that you will want to work every day on. At least that is the hope. The main thing is to get people to write, and posting on this note, whether you write or not, is my method of getting that to happen.



I did write, I was reducing the size of my story in progress. I did not work as much as I hoped to because much of the past week was getting ready for the Christmas Holidays. If I had worked my normal time on the story, I doubt I would have reduced it by too much. This is hard work as every sentence feels like it is needed. removing them takes a number of passes over a passage.
This week, I removed only 204 words. for this whole editing pass, I have only removed 2000 words and still have over ten thousand words to remove. I will eventually have to remove some major scenes.

I am keeping up on the story idea front. I have 53 story ideas in my compost pile. all the ideas I posted this week came out of my head the past two weeks. The top ten are interesting. I am not sure about anything below that. I have had a good couple weeks of ideas appearing. Makes up for weeks where nothing comes, though I would rather not have nothing weeks...

This year, the Christmas presents were either purchased from yard sales over the past several months or they were items I made by my own craftiness. Everybody seemed quite satisfied with the results.
I painted two sets of Christmas cards and they were well appreciated. It was some hard work but I liked the results better than any purchased cards. For one thing, there is a limited number of them that cannot be picked up anywhere else. Also, picking something off the shelf has a different dynamics than taking the time to actually make them.
The same went for presents I made out of wood or yarn. Rather than grabbing something off a shelf, I spent a lot of time thinking about it long before it was given.
Because of this effort, I had more fun giving than in any year I ever had. I did not even care if I got anything. That was a wonderful feeling. I did get some gift cards, though.

For a story idea. one might have a society where one just pushes a button to give someone a gift. One can give to one person or thousands, and one can give the same thing or a thousand different things with no more effort.
One person chooses to do something different this time. she actually goes to the supply houses, searches for and picks up the items she wants to gift, and delivers them personally to the people who are getting them. By doing it personally, there is conversation, eye contact, and sometimes physical contact, which people normally do not experience on a normal basis. She also gets to meet all those different people which is a joy since everybody spends most of their lives in cubicals or rooms.
Because she is gone all the time, she does not get many of the things sent to her cubical. She is satisfied that she actually meets people personally, which is a better present than anything they could hit a button and give her.

As to the question of the day, I can honestly say

YES I WROTE!!!
Though not as much as I wanted to.

DID YOU WRITE?