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?"
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)
