ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Another lazy day with a lot of time away from the keyboard. Most of it was spent writing other things, some of which were work, some of which was not. Kept thinking I should go write some novella now, then didn’t. Watched some Arrow. Watched some new sci-fi show put together by SyFy channel in the US, whose name escapes me. Made an attempt to watch the Painkiller Jane series that was put out by the Sci-Fi channel before they changed their name to something that sounds like an STD. My Flatmate recommended PJ, but I’m not really clicking with it. It’s slow. The voice-over irritates me. It gets bonus points for having two female characters on the special government task-force team, who actually like each other and get along. Session 5.1 (10:49 PM – 11:25 PM) Word Count: 675 Lots of ground-word type stuff for chapter two. Most of it is wrong. What I’m writing now is framework kind of stuff, which I’ll flesh out and add to when I get to write-club tomorrow. Made the mistake of writing in bed, which means I dozed off at the keyboard at least once. I am not a write all night and make your word count no matter what kind of guy anymore.  I am not adjusting to this as well as I should, given how long I’ve had get up and go to the office type dayjobs for a while now. Hence this is posted very late on Monday, rather

Went and delivered a library presentation for work this morning, which is one of those things that’s both awesomely fun and enormously draining. You’d think, after eight years doing the teaching thing at university, I’d get over the pre-presentation nerves and post-presentation crash, but it still happens every single time. Once again, I didn’t end up kicking off my writing day until very late in the evening. Once again, having to post this diary is probably my saving grace, as I stuck with things a little longer than I would have if I wasn’t posting here. Session 4.1 (11:36 PM – 12:20 AM) Word Count: 723 And so the end of Chapter One is reached. Dead character is now dead. All things considered, I’m giving myself the rest of the night off. Total Daily Writing Time: 44 minutes Daily Word Count Total: 723 Total Manuscript Writing Time: 4 hours, 58 minutes Total Manuscript Word Count: 4,338

The big plan for today: finish Chapter One and nail the sucker down. This’ll mean a lot of focus on the final scene in the chapter, plus some whole-of-chapter revision once that’s done to knock off the worst of the rough edges, take out the narrative tics that creep in (my characters spend a lot of time shrugging), and plug in any missing sensory/setting information. This is so not the way you’re meant to write, according to all the conventional wisdom, but my process is what it is. I’ve learned the hard way, over the years, that the words-at-any-cost, you-can-edit-later isn’t the best approach for me. I do not edit well. Once I stop working on a draft, I cease carrying the story around in my head. I remember seeing an old interview with Douglas Adams where he talked about the creation of the random improbability drive, which came about based on the judo principle on using an attacker’s momentum against them. After writing himself into a corner where every solution seemed improbable, he came up with a solution that attacked that head-on. I can respect the elegance of that, and I keep looking at it as the perfect metaphor for the way this novella wants to start. *Everything* that I found vaguely frightening has found its way in. Anything I found myself struggling with has become the central focus. It may work. It may not. I won’t know that ’til I finish at the end of the month and

Here is my morning routine on days that I am heading to the day-job: the alarm goes off at 7:00 AM. I check my email and social media on my phone, go through my morning ablutions, shower, and breakfast. Ordinarily I’m front of a writing computer by 8:00 AM, which gives me an hour of writing time before I have to jump in the car and drive to the State Library of Queensland where the QWC offices are housed. I like this routine. Kicking the day off with writing – particularly if that’s not what I’m going to be doing for the majority of my day – is good for my psyche. Today is not a day-job day, so that routine goes out the window. Its 7:46 AM when I sat down to start writing this and I am not yet out of bed. The odds of me being at the non-internet computer by 8:00 AM are pretty slim. Partially this is ’cause today isn’t actually a full-fledged non-work day – it’s a TOIL day, picked up as a result of working a lot of weekends in the last few weeks. My body-clock is all confused. I feel like I should be heading for work, and it feels sinfully luxurious to hang out in bed. There are not many things in my life that qualify as sinfully luxurious, so I indulge them when I can. Session 2.1 (9:00 AM – 9:23 AM) Word count: 474 Late start. Had I not