The summer holiday has just ended on our topsy turvy side of the world and today the baby koalas returned to school. They were both bizarrely happy about it. Am I that boring?
They scored great teachers; in fact, soccer boy got the one he'd been hoping for. He has been separated from a couple of his friends, one close friend in particular, but the biggest chunk of his group of friends is in his class with him so he's pretty happy. Princess has her best friend with her, hooray, so she'll be in clover.
So it's back to work properly for me. Well, I tried. I made three calls and none of my clients were in. Oh, dear. How to spend my time? I rose to my own challenge and wrote just under 400 words to finish the short story I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. It's a short story of just over 5000 words, mostly written in small batches of a few hundred words here and there - words that I would not have written without this challenge to keep me going, even if it was just to crunch out a paragraph on the laptop on the sofa late at night. I'm learning that while being able to sit down for an hour or more and write 1000 words or more is the ideal, it is possible to work in a different way.
I'll give the story a quick edit over the next couple of days and then let it sit for a while and apply my new technique to a WIP. A more demanding and more complex task, yes, but if I keep at it, even a tiny bit a day, I should always know where the story is going, making it easier to keep my line of thought.
I hope!
BTW, my story is sci fi - a whole new world for me, literally.
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7 comments:
My Small Son couldn't wait to go back after Christmas. Then on day 2 he cried his eyes out and wanted to come to my school with me. Sheesh, you can't win. The 14 year-old and the 11 year-old would rather sleep. Chips off the old block!
Congrats on the short. This system is paying dividends for me too.
"Am I that boring?"
That is so funny. It creates a vivid - but inaccurate, I'm sure - picture in my mind.
My son's birthday takes place during the school year. We gave him the choice of school, or staying home with me. He chose school.
He made up for it, though. After the long Christmas break, he wanted to stay home.
Have a good day.
Glad to hear about the sci-fi.
In space, no one can hear you look cute and furry.
Koala, I'm afraid of you, especially now that there are threat levels.
:-)
What a cool and awesome idea!!! This is how I work best as well. I like to open my ms, go through and do some edits (it puts me back in the story), then write around 500 words. I can't really do more in one sitting because I want each sentence and each word to have energy....so it actually takes a lot out of me just to reach that little bit.
Good luck!!! And I think you'd be really good with sci-fi.
:-)
The last story I wrote, I did in spurts like that. I used Ywriter to create five scenes and then every day I set a timer for 15 minutes and wrote one scene. At the end of it, I added new files for any other scenes I might have thought of.
I did this for just under a month, I think, and if I changed my mind about what happened, I just wrote a new scene. But always only for 15 minutes (so I could never claim it was taking up too much of my day).
It took some time to take the results of that and make it into a comprehensible story (I probably threw out half of the scenes) but I ended up with a 5k piece that's out on submission now. I'll let you know how it goes.
Word count for today: 888 words. It took two hours. :(
And yes, I used http://onetwofiver.com/, how could you tell? ;)
Love your way of tiny-writing back into the creative zone. Well done! I have the same problem - I require myself to sit down and write for a long time. But the mere thought of it caused major performance anxiety. Will try your way. Thanks for sharing!
Also welcome to fantastic world of sci fi :)
Oh, back to school and some quality alone time. I loved those days. Good for you, McK, and the bonus of knowing the kids like their rooms, even better.
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