Tag: All Things Aster

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

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