As of today, I’m instituting a new weekly blog post about writing. Just as I always do an L3 post on a Monday[1] I’m now going to do a post about writing on a Wednesday. Since I couldn’t think of a name that I didn’t hate I’m not going to give it one. It’ll simply be the weekly writing post.
The idea will be to give myself a sense of accountability and progress. I can update you on my current projects and any insights into the writing per se.
Writing as Exercise
I’m doing this because I have started writing again. And I’ve started writing again on the basis that writing is like exercise. In that:
- it’s hard to face doing when you haven’t done it for a while
- it’s always a little hard to get going but enjoyable when you do
- still it’s always going to be easier not to bother
- but you do it because you want the long term results
- doing it regularly, possibly every day, is a good idea
- doing it every day makes it easier to get started
- doing it every day makes it more effective
- progress is gradual but real
Current Projects
Here’s a list of things I’ve been working on. I’m not going to give too much details here and may even resort to code names rather than titles (I’m a bit weird about talking about stuff that’s still in the early stages) and it’s not my intention to discuss specifics or give excerpts or anything like that. I mostly want to track progress.
TWI Monday Flash – The Write Idea is a writing forum I’m part of and they run a weekly flash fiction competition (250 words). I wrote a piece called “Looking for the Other Aardvark” about Noah. The prompt (that I used) was “it’s going to rain”. I got a couple of votes. There were I think 6 entries overall and the winner scored 4.
Web Writers August Challenge – This is an email list I’m part of. Yesterday I wrote a ~650word story on a theme of a change of attitude/latitude. Today I re-wrote it and it came to 999words. I was quite happy with the results even though I got latitude and longitude the wrong way round. D’oh!
The Young Poisoners Club – this is a story I submitted to an online competition I was part of in 2008. It’s the only one of several such competitions where I’ve completed each round. Anyway, when I started about a week and a half ago thinking about writing again at first I had no inspiration. So I looked at re-writing something and this was it. Sent it to Web Writers and got some nice feedback but realised I’d done little more than tweak it when it needs some structural changes. I may look at making it a play.
The Magic Witch – oh now this is a semi-mythical piece of work. I started it in 2003 and have gone back to it a couple of times but never managed to finish it. It’s a children’s story. In its current form it has, or had until a few days ago, a beginning, an ending and a part in the middle with the words “MISSING MIDSECTION” in bold. I’ve now written some notes sketching out the missing midsection. All I have to do now is write it.
Radio play – I’ve had this idea that I’d like to write a radio play. Aside from possibly converting YPC above I scribbled down an idea called “airship“. No more than notes on an idea for a sort of theme and a character.
World/Feeling – this is super-vague. If I had to describe my own work then I’d say that most of my stories are cute ideas or twist-in-the-tail stories. What I’d like to be able to do is create a sense of a world, a character or just a tone. Like I said, vague.
Well that was quite a lot. Mind you that’s almost two weeks’ worth and I’ve been on holiday. Back to work tomorrow but I do intend to still write every day.