Did You Write? October 3, 2011

Did You Write? October 3, 2011

It is that time of the month to tell about what is going on in your life, projects you worked on, failures and problems that came up during the week. While you are telling about your life, mention about your writing, even if you did not write. the idea is that the habit of posting will develop, and in the process, the feeling of shame for not writing will cause you to get something on paper just so you can say you wrote.
How much you write is unimportant. That you write, is. Of course, big word counts give a heady feeling, but tiny word counts can be important, especially if you are editing, or if you replace a section that was not working. In editing, one might actually be working to reduce the wording to fit into requirements of a publication so word counts can go down.

In my usual list of what is writing, all new writing is writing. Editing is also writing, even if it is the work of others. Critiquing is also a form of editing and counts as writing. Poetry, blogging article writing, technical writing, writing assignments, world and character creation all are writing. So can be board posts and E-mails if they are very wordy and pertain to writing or story. Many might not count some of these as writing, others will have more. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, our answer is yes, you wrote.

As to my writing I rewrote my spirit of Vengeance story, finishing last night. I fired t off to my writing partner as a second reader to see how it stands up. I am hoping. I do have clean up editing and tweaking, but I need to know if I have to make major changes before I put more work on it. I will shift to rewriting the second story of the series, based on what I changed in the first one. In this edit, I added nearly two thousand words in the process. the fun part was as I worked, I came up with new stuff to add, to change, to improve it, that I never considered before.
I got a copy of my writing partner's first book early in the week and finished reading it this weekend. Fortune's Pawn - Authored by Nancy A. Hansen -is available at http://www.pulpmachine.blogspot.com/ and is also on Amazon.com.

On the story idea front, I ended last month with 31 story ideas (30 days in the month) on page 33 for a total of 19715 words of pure drivel. they can be found at
http://www.xprodigy.net/board/ and go to Writer's Roost or directly to
http://www.xprodigy.net/board/viewforum.php?f=9&sid=d03b94aba95815d313b694a90c4c473b .
I have 40 ideas in the compost pile. I had a couple days where I got several story ideas during the day which cranked up the compost pile count. I only posted the first idea this month and am two ideas behind at this second, but at least this is the beginning of the month so I have plenty of time to catch up.

I am a believer that old information is like gold. I have POPULAR MECHANIC book sets from the 50s that actually tell you how to do things compared to later ones that are mostly full of pictures. I have Model Railroading magazines from the 70s and 80 where they tell how to make a railroad car from stock materials while modern magazines tell you to take 'this kit' and do 'this' to it. I have photography books from the 70s and 80s that actually tell you what the light and optics are actually doing so you know how to get the effect you want because you actually understand what is happening while modern stuff does not even cover that at all, just point and shoot.
One of my sisters is learning Quilting and I ran across some really old magazines, 70s and 80s, that I will be sending to her. There is a lot of really good and interesting information in them and I have no interest in any kind of sewing. I got her a gold mine. I paid comparatively little for them too.

Using the above for a story idea, society had advanced greatly. Planetary travel was fairly common, but interstellar travel was found impossible unless one was evacuating the solar system, there was no need for that. All data had gone digital, where one had a "book" or "paper" that was tied to the main computer systems. One could write on the surface and it would put digital marks on the surface for you so you could do anything you could do on paper, but could also manipulate it digitally. Actual paper was nearly unknown.
An eccentric asteroid was watched for several years as it passed through the solar system. the route was known almost to the inch. A very big ship landed on it to take samples and readings from the surface. An engineer on the ship slipped while doing minor maintenance and the ship detonated. The surface of the asteroid became a plasma jet for a period and the orbit changed. Now they watched the asteroid head right into the sun.
the asteroid somehow survived until it hit the corona of the sun and popped into an expanding ball of plasma. That ball of plasma headed out into space again. The plasma shockwave arrived at a major space station in solar orbit just as a really strong solar flair arrived. The computer systems were fried completely.
People worked to the manual and mostly mechanical systems operating, but the computer was out. This space station was built by an eccentric trillion are who had physical copies of most major books written before he died. The librarian of the collection remembered something and finds the technical manuals for the whole space station. they restart the whole system by following the old data. They thought it was a bit quirky to be loading data into the computer manually by plugging big pentabite hard drives into the system and copying the data.
They get the whole space station fully operating, only data entered in the last year was lost because the librarian was making yearly copies of the data on the system according to the dictates of the will.
I am using this for today's story idea.

As to the question of the day

I can honestly say,'

YES I WROTE

DID YOU WRITE?