Blog Ing

This is where I post my daily (or not-so-daily) writing progress. The idea is that even if the journal itself isn’t daily, keeping it up reminds me to keep up my goal of writing something creative every day.

And of course, you’re welcome to follow along. (I hope you do; that’s why it’s here, and not in a locked diary somewhere.) If you see something interesting or want to drop a word of encouragement or disparagement, or simply question my sanity, please leave a comment.

For more about this writing log/word count thing and why I’m doing it, see the Word Counters Union page here on Blog Ing or the Word Count Buddies website.

July

July 18
The first writing I’ve done since mid-June: started a book of spells for the Harry Potter inspired games my kids play. The young lad, especially, has been inspired by the new movie, and has been carrying his wand around and inventing spells (really cool ones, the kind you’d love to see in a book or use in a roleplaying game), so I got into the act and invented a few of my own and then spent all morning describing and categorizing our inventions.

June

Looks like this is becoming a monthly summary more than a daily journey. The first two weeks of June were good for writing. I didn’t write every day, but I wrote regularly, and I wrote a lot: more than 5,000 words. The second half of the month…not so much. We went on a 10-day trip to Utah for a family reunion (and an unexpected funeral), and no writing happened there. When we got back, work stress and some marketing writing I’m doing for a business my dad and brother have started meant that I had neither the time nor the mental energy for fiction.

May

May 21
May is already almost over, and nary a word written. But today I finally got some writing in and posted 122 words on the Word Count Buddies website. As a victory against inertia and stress and tiredness, it’s small, but I’ll take it. Gotta start somewhere, right?

April

April 22
I need to keep up with my writing log a little better. I have been writing, not every day, but regularly and frequently. It’s a bit frustrating, though, because I just can’t seem to write enough. I have a plot and some new characters and several specific scenes in mind, but 6-700 words a week, though a lot better than none, just isn’t enough forward momentum.

I’m still working on the cat story (if you were wondering…and if you weren’t, well, I’m telling you anyway). I have to say, I never thought that the biggest and most successful attempt I’d make at novel-writing would be a YA fantasy about cats. But it has been a lot of fun. And the fantasy project I’ve been working on (or thinking about working on) for so long is still slowly percolating in the background. One of these days I’ll get back to it — and when I do, it’ll be quite a different story from the one I set out to write.

But for now, it’s the cat story 100%. I want to finish it so that I can say I finished something. And so that my kids can read it. I’m not planning on trying to publish it — if my kids enjoy it and a few friends and relatives also want to read it, I’ll consider that my personal equivalent to the NY Times bestseller list.

March

Mid-month
Pathetically little writing
I got a good start on the next section of the Cat story, but was derailed for a few days by sickness (laid out by flu and strep throat both at once) and then for several more by work stress and working late for a big project deadline. Very irritating. I had a good thing going in February, and now this. However, I did have a plot-and-character epiphany that (it seems) pretty much solved all the story gaps that had been dragging me down since finishing NaNoWriMo in November. I stopped right in my tracks and laughed out loud for the sheer suddenness and awesomeness of it all when the idea came to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a fiction-writing moment quite like that before. Now I just have to somehow manage to WRITE IT DOWN.

February

Mid-month
Varying amounts of writing
The Cat story continues. The part I started writing in January (see Jan. 26 entry) is done, and I took a somewhat unplanned few days’ hiatus to gear up mentally for the next part, which involves a different character and a totally different setting.

February 3
No words today.
There’s sickness in the house, and it’s throwing my schedule off. However, I have been writing fairly consistently over the last couple of weeks, averaging about a page (500 words or so) a day. The scene that I mentioned in my last entry is still going, and going fairly well. I’m getting close to the end of it, though, so I need to start thinking about transitioning into other parts of the plot. This is a place I’ve never been before with fiction writing — I’m almost to the end of what will be my first novel manuscript. I know more or less where the story is going, several plot threads are about to come together into a new location and an action-packed, perilous climax, and I’m getting impatient because I want to be done. It’s not that I don’t want to write anymore; on the contrary, I’m having loads of fun with it. I want to tell the story, and I can’t wait to put it before my audience. I love writing it, but I can’t write it fast enough.

January 2009

January 26
197 words
More on the Cat story. I’ve been thinking in circles on the plot for so long that I was beginning to despair of ever knowing how to proceed. Then I did something radical: I just started to write. And wouldn’t you know it, just putting myself into the character’s place in that long-delayed scene and writing without any predefined idea how it was going to move this particular cat along in the plot started giving me ideas. I still don’t know exactly how I’m going to tie things together in the end, but I find that I never really do — detailed planning isn’t a normal part of my writing style and never has been, not even in the days of hefty academic writing (which you’d think would be conducive to planning, if not actually dependent on it). My mind just doesn’t work that way, I guess. At least now I’ve got a direction to go in, and I’ll find out what the landscape looks like over the hill when I get there.

January 25
206 words
I’ve been doing a little bit of writing during the month, but haven’t been keeping track of it very well. I’ve been on the Wall of Shame over at the WCB home page for a solid 5 weeks now…well, until today, when I broke my streak by actually posting my word count.

So what have I been writing? A guide to Harry Potter-style wandmaking, for one thing. The kids have been into wands lately, so I did some research and have come up with a detailed guide to magical wand-woods and magical cores and some Potter-inspired magical theory of my own conjecture. It’s nearing 20 pages and still not finished, but getting close; the Wife has volunteered to use her spiral-bind machine to turn it into a more or less “real” book for the kids to read, carry around, and play with. In addition to that, the Cat Novel project is still going…just very, very slowly. I’ve reached a point where I can’t see myself past a plot problem that I wrote myself into during NaNoWriMo, and I’m trying to feel my way around or through it, hoping that I won’t have to just go back and rewrite half the story; I’d like to have the thing a little more complete before I start rewriting. (The 206 words are on the Cat project, btw.)

December 2008

There was some writing going on in December…but not very much. The holidays kind of took me out of my rhythm, and I found that I felt a bit exhausted, writing-wise, after NaNoWriMo.