01-02-12 Did You Write

01-02-12 Did You Write

Wow, where did the year go? It came and went like mad.
We get to do double duty with this post. Not only do we get to tell about how we did this past week, we also can tell about what we did this past year.
Many of us won't have great numbers to mention, but others will have great things to report. I found I forgot about a lot of what I did this year until I added it up.

One new year's resolution you might try to make, is to post to these notes every week, even if you do not write. The hope is that you will feel ashamed about not posting that you are writing and will open something just so you can give a positive report. Make that a habit and you can finish things.

How much to write is up to you. It could be "THE RIGHT WORD" or it could be tens of thousands of words. It is up to you and your goals.

What is writing is pretty much up in the air. We all agree that new writing is writing, but so is editing, even if it is the work of someone else. Critiquing counts as editing and is therefore writing.
Poetry, blogging, technical writing, writing assignments, world or character development, synopsis and query letters are all writing. Bulletin board and E-mails can also be writing if they are very wordy and pertain to writing or story. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, our answer is yes.

As for me, I finished SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE ARRIVAL, and fired that off to the publisher. It will be a while before I get word about it.
I started this morning SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE TRAP and have written three pages and 1250 words. I actually wrote a couple hundred words more, but had to change how the story was going to fit the first story better, and to make the action logical. I doubt anything of my first version of this second story will be used. it has a good fight sequence but the way I picture it, it is not going to happen in that kind of location so that will go by the wayside.

I have not done a word count, but it looks like I wrote about ten stories this year, four or five actually had THE END as part of them. It is not bad.

On the story idea front, I have 53 story ideas in my compost pile. I have had a good time coming up with ideas faster than I have posted them. I like that. I also STOLE some story prompts someone posted and added them to my list even though they are not counted. Some of them are good seeds for concepts.
For the Month of December, I posted 31 story ideas in a 31 day month, coming to page 40 with 18095 words. I almost posted an extra story for the month but could not quite work out a handle on the idea so It ended up being the first idea of the year, having to do with the effects of a problem that happened at the Y2K change-over.
I did quite well for the year. for the 365 days, I posted 371 ideas, that was six ideas more than the days of the year. It would be nice to do better than that, but I am not going to complain. I would only complain if it were less ideas for the year. Those 371 ideas covered 415 pages with a total of 241,578 words of pure drivel. I count that as two books worth of writing.
One nice thing about the story ideas this year is that one of them ended up being the work I fired off to the publisher before the first. While it had something of the same sequence as the story idea, it was not the same story. That is one reason I have no problems posting my ideas on line for other authors to use. If twenty of us wrote from the same story idea, we would have twenty different stories.
I will say that a good number of the ideas are worth writing, it is strictly finding one that catches one's attention. Years ago, one of the boards I post my ideas had a major crash. I spent time copying old ideas back onto the board. I found myself having to take the time to read one or two of the ideas of each month's production. I look at that as a good indication of how many of the ideas are actually worth writing. Of course, you have to look at all of them to find the right ones.

For the upcoming year, I aim to write two Spirit of Vengeance stories, and two Waxy dragon stories. Hopefully something else of interest will show up along the way too. I will continue my story ideas, though I expect to continue to post them in batches like I am now.
There is an art show I will be part of on March 11th. I have two main projects to get ready for the show. One is a dragon that I am carving out of a wood who’s form suggested it was a dragon. The other is a large vase that will have five faces around the outside. Once they are done, anything else I work on is just additional.


As to the question of the week,

I can honestly say

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?