Holiday Weekends and New ThingsPosted by dhoffman on June 1st, 2010
Holiday weekends, as a rule, are never great times for parking in front of a flickering computer screen and writing. It’s a weather thing, partially, but it’s also the fact that friends are around and it’s not socially acceptable to excuse yourself at ten o’clock when there’s company and disappear for four hours.
Still, not a terrible weekend, as far as things go.
Which is to say, the few days “off” were relaxing and great and when I sat down to write last night, Monday night, after the smoke had settled and we’d brought the towels in from the pool, I wrote about 1,400 words like it was No Big Deal and the bits of Chapter Fifteen I was fighting with myself over feel like they’re well in the past.
I thought about writing more but I made myself stop. Didn’t want to overdo it and I had another project I wanted to spend a drop of time on, as well.
That other project . . . well, that’s under wraps for right now. It’s pretty interesting and exciting but I want to make sure it’s going to materialize the way it seems to be materializing before I say anything official. It’s a new thing, and a new way for me to do the thing, and that’s exciting. Even if it doesn’t work out, it’s been a great exercise pulling things together and flexing the creative muscles in a non-standard way.
Also, in preparation for this mysterious thing, I decided to try something a little different for organizing my starting out thoughts. Just an outline but it was SO effective I think it’s safe to say I’ll be playing with one of these whenever I’m starting a future project.
All I did was write out non-descriptive, non-dramatic, non-fancy one-liners for each basic element of the story. So, “Amy goes for a run” or “Tommy goes to the laundromat”. Simple as hell but by removing the flowery stuff I was really able to cut to the base of the story. It took about fifteen minutes to put the whole thing together and then I just sort of sat back and marveled at what a useful tool it was.
Which is nice. No long weekends for almost a month and it’s my goal to really get cranking on Animals now. I’ve got this other thing, sure, and that’ll take up time. But I would love to have a finished Second Draft by the end of the summer. Something I could pop back to and tidy up and maybe let a few folks read so they can tell me how terrible it is.
That’d be kind of fun, I think. Not the “Gawd, this sucks!” parts but the “Here, want to read this?” parts.
Something to look forward to, then. Always good to have one of those floating around.