5th Grade Plague, Vikings, and Navigation of Wordbergs

Life in General...

My son no longer has a fever and has been feverless all day.  Yay! 

He felt so good, in fact, that he said he wanted me to watch him win a particular video game for the first time. I agreed.

I am not sure what the objective was, but we stared at a world map for about five minutes and then the game prompted him that he won.

Whew! That was a close one . . . I guess.

I watched a new show called The Last Kingdom. It was okay. It seems a little slow paced to me. A few scenes went too far, I thought. I'll watch it again, though, because I think it has potential. It also prompted the memory and new curiosity about Vikings, which has had three seasons, I think.

The rest of the day, I wrote

The Writing and Current Projects...

Following Dean Wesley Smith's example, I decided to outline in reverse today.  That is, I outlined the two chapters I have already written in the Alaskan fantasy (Af). Forward outlines (plotting in advance) don't seem to work for me.

Sure enough, this worked.  Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) it revealed that I ended both Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 in essentially the same way. That meant I would not be starting Ch. 3 today.

With many grumbles and whines, I cut the last 543 words of Ch. 2.

I took a short break. During which, I realized how I could end Ch. 2.

Back at the keyboard, I typed furiously (for me) and soon I had the 543 words back, plus another 216. This brings Ch. 2 past the 4,000 word mark, unlike the previous ending.    

Oh, there's something I wanted to mention. Been meaning to for a couple of days. My readers ("Heh, he thinks people read this!") might consider me obsessed with daily word counts.  Well, I am.  But it is not just because I want to brag about how prolific I am. Nor do I believe that quantity trumps quality. I would not have cut the chunk of my "finished" chapter today if I believed that.

In the last couple of months, I began to understand the old saying that "only 30% of what a writer produces is publishable." This means 70% is substandard. Which means we see only the tip of the iceberg of what any author writes. That's a lot of words everyday (for most).

I read back over stories and abandoned chapters slowly and meticulously, then compared them to other things I wrote quickly and less constipatedly.  The latter is better. Less pretentious. Every time.

I also believe what people consider talent or genius is not a gift. Instead, what gets noticed results from persistence. Of trying over and over until you get it right.  Like Thomas Edison, who was supposed to have said to a reporter who asked him what it felt like to fail 1000 times at creating the light bulb. He said, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention that required a thousand steps."

These beliefs inspire me to try to write more and more each day and to do so consistently. Without it, I become all theory and no practice and quite the dull boy. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in that pile of words will be 30% that is good enough someone else will want to read it. Maybe they will even ask, "What are you writing next?"

Word counts for Sunday, Oct 12, 2015...

219 = Fiction (not counting the 543 I cut and rewrote)

628 = Blog

Monthly totals for October 2015...

2,286 = Fiction

3,843 = Blog

MANUSCRIPT TOTAL COUNTS...

9,262 = Af (Alaskan fantasy)

3,679 = Mhn (Missouri horror novel)