Blog Post #16, In Which I Make Some Remarks About The Magic Of Writing
Yesterday's post surprised me. It turned out better than i expected. The stuff i talked about-writing stuff down and fixing it later-really came through for me.
I started yesterday's post with not much more than the title in mind; not knowing what i wanted to say or how to say it.
It started, as most of my posts seem to, as a jumble of disconnected sentences, my mind churning out stray thoughts to be captured in pixels. I worked sporadically, in half-hour sprints. There was progress, but it was slow progress. The hour grew late-i kept working. It grew later-i started to worry. And something happened.
Somehow, as i pounded haphazardly on the keyboard, something shifted. And emerged. Ideas collided and cohered; a structure arose from the chaos; fumbling paragraphs were merged, awkward phrases were fixed, one thing led to another and everything just came together-and as the Witching Hour drew near, i added the finishing touches and mashed "Post!"
It was the kind of magic that you have to experience yourself.
Ahem.
Although most of the work was, in fact, done yesterday, i started writing yesterday's post towards the beginning of NaBloPoMo (when i thought i would need to do check-in posts every week in order to fill the time). I had dumped some thoughts into that file (named "week1" at the time), and i was glad to have those few, disjointed paragraphs when they became the basis of the new post (redubbed "checkpoint").
I have several such drafts simmering; i worked on a few of them today, while deciding what to write about.
It would be nice to get a queue going, where the next couple days' posts are already written, so i can write without worrying too much about finishing on time. (Does LiveJournal let you do that thing where you set the timestamp to the future, and the post doesn't appear until then?)
...
The only problem is that i'd need to finish a bunch of posts first, and once i finish a day's post, i don't have much motivation to write more-every time i've finished early, i've used the rest of the day to code.
Sigh.
P.S. This post also turned out better than expected: i'm not sure what's up with the pseudo-poetic bit at the beginning, but it was fun to write! Is writing always going to be this surprising?