Revamping this page is going to have to wait. I’m slipping behind on my writing goals and it is way too easy for me to put off writing by dinking with code. Right now I’m about ten percent of the way to my 50K. As I mentioned earlier, I am not doing the typical NaNoWriMo of doing 50K in a novel. I feel that it’s more important for me to concentrate on getting short fiction written at this point in my writing “career.” Thus my goal is 50K of stories. I may not even end up with a lot of stories finished, but I at least want to get 50K wordsof short fiction written. I specifically made my goal to be the 50k instead of the potentially more structured goal of writing a certain number of stories. Sometimes it takes a while for ideas to fully gel in my little head, and I’ve found that the best way to make them gel is to just friggin Write. However, lately I’ve been a bit lazy and have allowed myself to Not Write because I didn’t have a solid idea of where the story was going to go. And you know what I end up with using that approach? No Stories.
So wasted a bit of time last night and created a spreadsheet of all of my in-progress stories. This includes stories that are no more than a paragraph or a few sentences at this point. Quick scrawls of ideas just so that I didn’t lose the concept. What I’m trying to do now is to write at least 2500 words a day. And it doesn’t have to be all on one story. I may write several hundred words on a story, then when I get stuck I’ll pull up something different and start in on that. I do have a sub-goal that if I open up a different story, I at least have to write a hundred words on it before moving on to something else. And so far it seems to be working. I’m not quite up to my 2500 words a day goal, but I’m certainly writing more than I have since Clarion. And I don’t have any stories finished yet, but out of 16 “In Progress” stories, right now I have three that I have finally developed a strong feel for, and know where they’re going. Cool thing to me is that I can see this working. I would not have reached this point with those three stories, of finally knowing what to do with them, if not for absolutely forcing myself to write SOMETHING. Yes, everything is going to require huge edits later, but it’s better than the blank page.
WFC really fired me up in a lot of ways. It’s always inspiring seeing so many of my peers having fantastic success, and it’s also a good kick in the ass to develop what Daniel Abraham calls Butt Glue, i.e. the discipline to sit down and Write. WFC was also good for my morale, because, as odd as this sounds, it’s a relief to hear other writers being just as neurotic as I can be. It’s encouraging to hear that writers whom I idolize still get rejected. And it helps to remind me of what my ultimate goals are.
Of course the drinking and parties are a blast as well.
I love the idea of just forcing the words and not worrying about what they are going towards. A friend of mine asked where I am going on a story that I am working on that I’m posting as a write in a blog. I told him I didn’t know. That’s the whole idea for me of posting it as I write. I normally end up plotting for a while and then not knowing how I would fill the spaces, so I just put it away and never actually write something. I’ll have to try NaNoWriMo some year. Good luck reaching your 50K.
2005
kalbzayn