July 28th, 2010 § § permalink
According to the first 500 words of the Valkyrie Project…
Having only read The Da Vinci Code, all I can say is: ouch. I certainly wouldn’t mind selling millions of copies of my books, but I’ve seen other authors names on those IWL badges and I’d much rather be like any of those.
Another 700 works from later in the Valkyrie Project bring me to the same result. I guess I shall have to resort to some sort of gimmickery now to get people to read my work. Oh well. I suppose it’s better than if I’d turned out to write like Stephanie Meyer.
May 27th, 2009 § § permalink
Now, if I just had a time machine so I could get to a point where I’d actually finished writing something…
I watched Primer last night (I’d been meaning to watch it for a long time). I’ve been watching Terminator all season. I’ve known for a while that I’m a sucker for time travel.
I haven’t quote*unquote written anything for a while. But, I realized that I was putting too much pressure on myself to get it done while also having (or creating for myself) a significant amount of pressure at work. But I’ve finally recovered from that, and have gotten to the point where I am ready to start writing again. This time, I’m not going to pressure myself with word counts or anything like that though, since clearly that didn’t work for me.
So, I’m revising the outline of a project that I’d started on with the intention of adding time travel elements (easier than it sounds, actually, now that I look at it) to make it more interesting to my unconscious mind. Hopefully, by making it align (even more) closely to something that I’d be interested in reading, I’ll keep myself interested in writing it.
I’ve also rearranged my Netflix queue so I’ll get some good time travel movies that I’ve been meaning to watch for a while anyway. I also want to get some good scifi books about time travel, but I’ve got so much other stuff to read anyway, that I’m not going to dive into that just yet.
June 25th, 2008 § § permalink
6/18: 187
6/19: 0
6/20: 229
6/21: 0
6/22: 0
6/23: 10
6/24: 290
Last week I mostly had positive comments about the writing… this week, while I got over 700 words, but each of those days when I actually did some writing (not counting the 23rd), the time was spent on a different project. So, despite getting over 100 words a day (hey, it’s something), really each project is only getting 34 words per day. Which means that to get any of them to 90,000 words, it will take me 7.25 years. And since I’m working on all 3 simultaneously, that puts the end date about 21 years away. I’m fairly certain this is my subconscious way of continuing my normal mode of operation; that being: start doing something, don’t finish (or only work hard enough to get somewhat decent at a skill), and move on.
June 11th, 2008 § § permalink
6/4: 91
6/5: 0
6/6: 0
6/7: 257
6/8: 0
6/9: 0
6/10: 435
There are two things that worry me here: The first is that the bulk of those words (and there’s not that many of them) are on a new project that I just started a couple weeks ago. This follows my habit of starting a multitude of projects and not finishing them. The ability to actually finish a project is, of course, the main thing that separates people who get published from the people who have unfinished works sitting on their desktop forever.
The second thing worrying me is the lack of determination to write every day. As you can clearly see, I have not yet formed the necessary habit of writing every day. I’ve been posting to this blog nearly every day (though several of those posts came from drafts started a while ago), but that doesn’t count as “writing” because it’s not writing fiction. However, you can also see that the public shame (as it were) of posting my word counts led me to write 435 words which I might have just left for a later date if not for knowing that I had to post this. Yes, I know there’s approximately 2 people who read this blog, but even that is enough to push me to at least a weekly writing habit.
