End of day wrap.
Okay, so... ~2,300 words today, and they're pretty good ones. I'm especially pleased with how the beginning of Kin and Distant Relations came together. I'm not throwing out the other things I'd written in my previous stabs at getting it going... one of the things I like about the approach I have now is that it gives me a place for them, a way of wrapping them up.
I have these wonderful characters of Dan and Del and Aidan Harris, and I have their general situation, but all of that is not a story, not even for my somewhat expansive definition thereof*. I started out back last spring with enough of a story to be getting on with, but a lot of the specifics crumbled after everything that happened over the summer.
What I have now is not the same story, I'm pretty sure, but it's the same characters. And it might even be a better story, because it's pretty dang good and I'm excited about it.
~2,300 words, in two hours of writing. I'm not going to try to break down how the rest of the day constituted "work" but it led to me writing 2,300 words I'm proud of and can use so let's not go second-guessing it.. There's a great comment on my last status post by Sumana Harihareswara, one of those rare and powerful human beings who along with popelizbet deserves the title of Functional Muse (it's not so much that she inspires art as she enables it).
She tweeted the same sentiment at around the same time, but the full quote loses something when foreshortened to 140 characters:
"So the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working."
Words to live by. And it gives me a happy feeling because that's what the bulk of my plan for the month is.
I'm not holding myself to a commitment to write a certain volume of entertaining prose, as much as I'm holding myself to a commitment to live my life in a way in which that will happen anyway.
*Sidenote: There's an excellent post here I've been meaning to link to, which looks at storytelling tropes from the angle of the U.S.-centric mindset... the tropes we inherited from Europe and developed on our own... being treated as "universals". One of my favorite parts is the calling out of the reduction of "story" to only include "stories about conflict/resolution", particularly where the resolution must be violent.
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/303795.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.
I have these wonderful characters of Dan and Del and Aidan Harris, and I have their general situation, but all of that is not a story, not even for my somewhat expansive definition thereof*. I started out back last spring with enough of a story to be getting on with, but a lot of the specifics crumbled after everything that happened over the summer.
What I have now is not the same story, I'm pretty sure, but it's the same characters. And it might even be a better story, because it's pretty dang good and I'm excited about it.
~2,300 words, in two hours of writing. I'm not going to try to break down how the rest of the day constituted "work" but it led to me writing 2,300 words I'm proud of and can use so let's not go second-guessing it.. There's a great comment on my last status post by Sumana Harihareswara, one of those rare and powerful human beings who along with popelizbet deserves the title of Functional Muse (it's not so much that she inspires art as she enables it).
She tweeted the same sentiment at around the same time, but the full quote loses something when foreshortened to 140 characters:
"So the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working."
Words to live by. And it gives me a happy feeling because that's what the bulk of my plan for the month is.
I'm not holding myself to a commitment to write a certain volume of entertaining prose, as much as I'm holding myself to a commitment to live my life in a way in which that will happen anyway.
*Sidenote: There's an excellent post here I've been meaning to link to, which looks at storytelling tropes from the angle of the U.S.-centric mindset... the tropes we inherited from Europe and developed on our own... being treated as "universals". One of my favorite parts is the calling out of the reduction of "story" to only include "stories about conflict/resolution", particularly where the resolution must be violent.
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/303795.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.