Just started outlining (in a very loose way) a relationship gone wrong-primarily, the last and most vicious argument before the break-up-and I am literally sick to my stomach now. The sheer amount of vitriol is overwhelming to the point of nauseating.

In fact, I have to get up for a moment to recuperate. Excuse me.

I am looking for a few good pens ( Read more... )

Dear lord, I’m out of practice. Until recently I only wrote bits and pieces as they came to me. Now that I’m forcing myself to sit down and write at specific times, it...doesn’t work. The prose is anything but artful; it reads like the field notes of an anthropologist, a transcription, lacking depth and entirely devoid of emotion. Maybe I’m just ( Read more... )

So I’ve discovered Scrivener, which has been an absolute blessing, because it’s so conducive to my non-linear, scatter-brained approach. So now I have a central location for all my scrappy ideas and a way to arrange them in whatever fashion I please. Also, I got a kick out of creating a file of character mini-biographies, and then hyperlinking them ( Read more... )

So I said to myself, fuck it. I know that the ideas in my head are far from complete and cohesive, but at the very least get them down on paper. Or screen. I loathe Microsoft Word with every fibre of my being and have thus far resorted to writing in longhand, in notebooks, like our forefathers (and mothers, presumably). And while this had a certain ( Read more... )

It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about. Actually, I have tons. It’s just a matter of finding the right words, then putting all the words in the right order, from thought to sentence to paragraph to composition. Usually it comes easy, but not tonight, and not for the past few nights. And it frustrates me to no end, because it all seems ( Read more... )

Generally speaking, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, mostly because I tend not to keep them. However, I have two this year:

• Read more.
• Write more.

Best to keep it modest, I suppose.

One question lingers: first-person limited or third-person omniscient? This debate has been raging for years.

Props to LJ for finally implementing tags. I was trying to do something similar with the Memories feature, but it was clumsy and took forever, and eventually I threw up my hands and abandoned the project. Now I’m digging through the archives and manually grafting on metadata. For now, you’ll have to settle for just 2005. I still have three more ( Read more... )

It’s not a simple matter of good or bad. I can be a bit hard on myself sometimes (ok, all the time), but I don’t think I’ve ever called myself a bad writer. Not spectacular, but not bad either. I grew up thinking, however irrationally, that I was never really going to amount to much. But I could write. Oh, could I write ( Read more... )

I just had a flash of insight about my story, plot- and character-wise, a possible trajectory if you will. Sitting here thinking about it, I felt as though I were thrown backwards in my chair (as though kicked by a boot in the chest), then the most incredible chill down my spine, and then I got all teary-eyed, just completely overcome ( Read more... )