Writing

I need to write, and I need to be organized about it. I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks and have done a lot of reading on the subject. It all boiled down to one thing, do I want to slog through letter after letter and do it the old fashioned way, or just work on something and release it into the wild. I’m not saying I’m a great writer, or even a good one, but I know that in the past, there have been people that liked what I wrote.

Yesterday, with some poking of the husband, I got a drupal install over at melissathornton.net and have decided to shift all the whinging about writing and the actual stories themselves over there. There is a plan in place, and there won’t be a lot to see or even read for a while yet, because I’m still working on the first big story. I’ve determined that having 50,000 words of something is worth pushing on and seeing where it goes. I want to run it by a few people and get some basic editing done before I throw it out there to the world at large though.

So if you’re not interested in that bit of what I do, then you are going to be relieved to know that it’s going away other than the odd update here to say that I posted there. If you might be inclined to watch me have a mental breakdown over fictional characters, you may want to check there on occasion and see what happens.

I’ve been trying to write, although most days I do more sporadic tweeting and linking things. I find that when I sit down I either have a lot to say and can’t get it to make sense on paper, or I avoid what I want to say and just throw blurbs out all over the place. I’ve killed off one service that I was playing around with, so now it’s just the blog, twitter, and facebook. The problem I have with fb is that I have family that posts pretty much all day long and so there’s always something to catch up on.

I said some time back that once school started I wanted to set aside an hour or two every day to write. Even if it was nonsense, as least it would push the habit in a positive direction. My problem is that I sit in front of the screen and wait until the last minute and then see that nothing of value gets done during that time. There are hundreds of books and sites on writing out there. So I’ve spent the last few days doing more reading than writing. It’s not like there’s a block, I have the rough story in my head, and a good chunk of it outlined to a point that I should be able to sit and churn out a first draft. My problem is that there is so much of the story that it’s a bit overwhelming. It covers too much time, and in reality, if I were to write it all down it would be two distinct parts in different time periods.

After fighting through NaNo a few times and coming out with about 50k words on my best attempt, I think for me the idea of a daily word count may work better than just sitting down with no specific goal. I’m going to give this a try and see if it helps, it’s not like this post is around 300 words already, so it shouldn’t be that hard to do. There’s also the issue of getting it out for people to read, and there are a bunch of options as far as that goes. I’m not quite sure where I want to go, but I have some ideas. I guess I’ll start and see what happens.