January 16, 2012 Did You Write?

January 16, 2012 Did You Write?

I am short on time so I am making this short.
The idea of this note is to entice those of us who don't write regularly to try to develop good writing habits. By posting at this note every week, the urge to write during the past week so you can report well will become stronger.

I generally list things that can be writing in these notes. The essence is that if you have to ask if it is writing, it is. And we don't care much as to how much. It could be a goal of opening some work in progress to writing thousands of words during the week.

As for me, my writing has been slim. Long work days and home stuff that needed to be done got in the way. I am getting a better ides as to where my new story is going. I should do a story idea version of it to act as a guide, but I tend to actually try to write first.
I have a major problem in my stories. the best stories have where the character is at the very edge of failure and somehow pulls it out. My plots never get my character into that situation. I noticed it in something I wrote recently. I cannot seem to give my character a chance to fail. I have to work on that. I have come up with a problem my character has to solve and it is going to relocate one of the scenes I already wrote to near the end of the story. That requires re-plotting again in my barely designed guidelines (plot).

On the story idea front, including what I am posting tonight, I have 51 story ideas in my compost pile. I came up with four ideas just tonight. A lot of the new ones look like they will be good to write. I like that. I prefer ideas that are in the stack because I have not had a chance to write it, not that I decided to write something else.

I made some visible headway on one of two carving projects intended for the art show in March. One of the projects is a dragon carved in wood. I have a long way to go on that. I am sort of afraid to make a mistake so have been hesitating too much.
The other project is a vase with five faces carved on it. I just had to get myself to mount the wood on the lathe to make it into a vase. I have more to do on hollowing the vase out, but I have the outside formed and can start carving the faces. I now just have to decide what the faces will look like based on my carving skills.
Of course there are small fun things that I need to work on too. The dragon is both the easiest and the hardest piece to work on. The wood gives me the basic shape, but I have to make sure the limbs are in the right position and that is the hard part. Once I get it going, it should go very quickly, other than my power carving creates dust and I get quite covered on bad days.
I started woodworking Saturday, January 17, 2000. This last weekend was my official celebration of my wood start of woodworking. Too bad my work does not look like I have all those years in it. I only work on weekends and holidays so it takes longer to accumulate real hours of woodworking compared to doing it as a serious hobby or as a profession.

Using the above as a story idea,
He made religious icons.,They had to be made very carefully, using the proper chants to get the magic right. Sometimes he might take a standard type of wood and make the shape out of that, or he used wood that resembled the final shape, which was extremely powerful.
Using the shaped wood was also dangerous. One had to get the shape out of the wood right or it could turn on him. He once got in trouble when he found a piece of wood that resembled a lion. He got some of the detail wrong and it came alive and attacked him. He had to cut it apart to stop it. He then had to find all the bits and pieces and dispose of them using the proper chants to destroy the demon spirit that had entered it.
at the moment, he has a piece of wood that resembles a dragon. He has a deadline to get the dragon done, but he is in panic to get it right. Dragons cannot be stopped by carving tools.

As to the question of the week,

I can honestly say, with some shame of how little,

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?