alexandraerin

Well, today I wrote a 2,700 word chapter that's due tomorrow. There are some bits I might poke at before it goes up, but it's functionally complete. If the rest of the week continues like this.. well, no sense getting ahead of myself, I guess, but I have Plans. Oh, yes. Do I ever have Plans.

Going back to doing the writing of a chapter in a single day is quite a shift from the four day cycle that I had such success with, but I'm still following a similar practice. I'm still breaking the writing of a chapter up into three individual steps, and doing the conception/planning stuff in advance. The magic of the four day cycle is really that it helped me break down my writing process and figure out what to do on those days when the words won't just flow like water.

Processes. They are useful things.

5,000 words today! There will be a new short story for my newsletter subscribers this weekend, which will be available on Amazon and Smashwords after I've sought a bit of feedback on it.

(One of the things that makes me feel a bit of paralyzing iffiness about writing and sending out newsletters is when I feel like there's nothing of value in them. So the fact that I'm writing free-standing stories again... not just having ideas or getting started but writing and finishing them... is a huge relief. Yeah, I know, the author commentaries represented a huge amount of writing, but this isn't about rational concerns, just anxiety.)

My Tales of MU plans are developing apace. After some consideration, I think I'm going to keep the four day publishing schedule through December... only because it is December, and there are holidays and family activities coming up.

So, I wrote ~2,000 words of fiction and I made a little headway in my e-book stuff, plus a bit of newsletter writing. A lot of my progress today was mental. I'm working on a project that's a little hard to describe and will probably sound more than a little loopy, but I'm hopeful about its prospects... basically, I'm working on constructing an office in my head, complete with an assistant and a supervisor. If this works it will be brilliant.

Half of what I wrote today... I have this character in my head that won't go away and I've tried writing her as a superhero and I've tried writing her as a modern supernatural romance/erotica heroine and I'm trying her in all these different angles with her and nothing's really taking, but she's persistent so I think something's going to happen with her, but I'm not sure what.

So, after two days of ~1,000 words, I am pleased to report a ~3,500 word work day. And partially included in that is a surplus of words for the next chapter of Tales of MU, because I ended up splitting off some of what I'd written to save for later... after last chapter, I knew the next one should be slightly less eventful/dramatic, but my first attempt was just boring and too emotionally dead to follow on the heels of the confrontation. So I started rewriting and expanding...

You know, it's interesting to me to note how I often have really productive days when I've identified a problem with a chapter and am fixing it. It could be argued that it's a matter of necessity, thinking, "Okay, I have a thousand or two thousand words that don't work and I need to replace them!"... but I don't think that's it. I think it's that knowing a specific problem that needs fixing, it gives me a better target to aim for.

I think perhaps I should try to make this more a part of my actual formal process. Day 1 of the cycle is conceptual. I need to be thinking not just in terms of "what happens next" but "what is this chapter going to achieve" or "what does this chapter need to do" or "what kind of chapter do I need to go here". That's something I have thought about, in the course of things, but it's not something I always do think about, as a matter of routine.

Anyway, that's the score: 3,500 words. And 28 days of timely regular updates.

~2,500 words. w00t! I don't feel awesome but I beat my mark.

My goal for tomorrow is going to be to finish the chapter for Saturday, which seems pretty well within my reach. If I accomplish this I will be posting it at or around midnight Saturday so I don't have to worry about it. If I don't, I'll complete it in transit (or more likely, during my layover) and post it from Hagerstown.

Okay, well, I'm awake at four in the morning. Wide awake. Yesterday was a slower day due to the effects of insomnia - ~2,000 words of fiction and a bit more progress on A Wilder World. As I look at it, I realize that I should qualify my estimates of its completeness. While the basic rules for playing the game are almost entirely there at this point, the advancement/reward/development scheme isn't, and the rules for stuff on the GM side (like monster stat ranges) are way more rudimentary than player stuff.

That's partly because I'm prioritizing what players will need to know to play through a single session, and partly because those are the sorts of things that will are the trickiest things to pin down without playtesting. I'm not concerned with getting perfect mathematical balance between player characters and their enemies, for a couple of different reasons I'll get into in a more AWW-centric post. But still, it's going to take some practical experience to know I'm hitting the right notes there.

Insomnia is getting old. Unfortunately I think I'm acquiring resistance to melatonin, which has happened before. I might have to cut back on it for a while, which will make things get worse before they get better. But after more than a week of delayed (but not missed) sleep, I'm starting to miss sleep, so it's probably going to get worse anyway.

A modest day, but a successful one - ~3,000 words, divided between ~2,000 words of Tales of MU and ~1,000 words of what passes for vanilla erotica when I'm writing it. I still have one of those finished that I need to mark up for sale. Given how lucrative Kitty has been in its first month of existence, I think I'll be doing more of it.

I tried to power up my desktop computer this morning (for the first time since a bit before my vacation) and found that it's thrown a shoe again. This is the one that periodically needs to have its RAM re-seated, so not too surprising. Since I've got my new lappy I just ignored it for now and went on with my day... I only tried using it so I don't get too dependent on writing on a single machine. I'm waiting for the weekend to fix it, so that in the event that it takes more than opening it up and slotting the RAM back in I don't lose working time to it.

Also, I could use another night of good sleep before I try wrestling that monster out of and back into position.

I got right around 4,200 words today. I'm pretty proud of that under the circumstances, which included numerous sounds and interruptions. ~2000 words of Tales of MU, some of which will go on next chapter after I realized I had a perfect ending point for this one and I wrote past it, and ~2,200 of the story I started yesterday. I'm kind of edging towards "nervous wreck" territory, honestly, which helped me firm up my decision about scheduling a hiatus in March... though the fact that I still kicked out the words the way I did almost swayed me in the other direction. In the end I decided to split the difference and took the two regular MU updates in the middle of my trip off the schedule.

I'm not planning on taking anything like a whole week off of writing, but the time I'll have for it will be less predictable. Hence taking the biggest obligations off the schedule. It might be that everything just goes perfectly and the muse is there and I kick the chapters off anyway, in which case I'll just be coming back ahead. I just don't want to count on it happening and commit to them and then either wreck my vacation trying to meet that, or end up failing and having disappointed readers checking the site every few days (or hours) and getting frustrated.

Okay, so my final word count for today was ~3,500 words, and that's with some time spent on office work.

About 3,000 words of that was new stuff on the Tales of MU chapter I just posted (which leaves only a couple hundred words from the original chapter I rejected, though there's more of it that will be used later) The rest is stuff I added to Dangerous Instrumentality in the course of stitching the parts together.

Pretty decent day.

Today went a little weird for me. I had a major case of mind blank this morning... I'm using that as a more precise term than "writer's block". Nothing was coming. I wasn't lacking for ideas, just no words to go with any of them. I wrote a flash story, but it was like I was talking about yesterday when the words aren't flowing and I have to build a thing piece by piece... the results aren't as good and the work isn't as satisfying.

(Though I think it's an okay flash story, all the same.)

So I ended up writing a blog post about comic books, and then I considered making today my office day... I'd planned on doing that later in the week, but it's fallen on Wednesday and I thought maybe that worked for a reason, or I was in a rut. So I did a little preliminary work on one of my big tasks for this week, but I really wasn't feeling that, either.

So I decided to open up a blank document and forget all the stuff I *should* be working on and just start typing. Stream-of-consciousness writing on a timer is a skill that I think any writer would benefit from practicing.

The thing about my stream of consciousness, though, is that it tends to be prose anyway. I mean, that's how I'm able to write ten or twelve thousand words in two thirds of an hour. I think words. I think stories.

So what I ended up with when my timer went off was the beginning of a slightly vanilla (very vanilla by my standards) body positive erotica. I decided to run with it and an hour and half later I ended up with a finished 2,500 word story, which I shared with Jack. After his feedback, I think I can make it better and a bit longer, but with the logjam broken I wanted to turn my attention to some of my projects in progress. The expanded version of it should be ready before the next newsletter goes out next week.

I added 1500 words to the Tales of MU chapter in progress, which is within my required "just needs some polish" definition of finished for tomorrow. I added a thousand words to the fourth and penultimate or antepenultimate chapter of By Half Measures, and resolved an important emotional/character arc question regarding it. I think I need to rearrange some of the lines that I wrote, though, to make a clearer progression to the chapter's climax... a better crescendo, as it were.

So, that's 5,700 words on a day that started with me staring at a keyboard and feeling nothing, then going to read comics. I'm going to call this not too shabby. It's not my best day. It's not even my best day where I wrote over 5,000 words or the best day when I sat down and randomly wrote a finished story that I can sell... everything I wrote today is going to take more polish than my usual "pretty enough for punk" first-and-only draft.