Month: April 2018

Writing Journal/Random Notes 4.30.2018: Things happened, but who am I kidding?

Well, the last full week of April wound up being a bit of a flop:

+1,074 words written (blogging).

Days writing: 2 out of 7.

Days revising: 0 out of 7 for  total minutes.

Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 1 out of 7 days.

Yeah, it was like that.

I guess I could say that I had life things come up, etc. Which is true, in a sense. More behind the scenes stuff is happening, but you know how I tend not to get into too many personal blog details here. Once things begin to sort themselves out, I’ll probably talk about it briefly. None of it will affect the blog, though.

Right now, I’m kind of in a situation where I’m waiting on a lot of things – some of them writing-related, some work-related, some personal-related. There was one point last Tuesday where I was waiting on at least five different people to contact me about various things. I told my wife about that and she said “Welcome to the club.” (She runs her own consultancy firm.)

Also, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m in the lagging part of revising some projects. That is, I’m looking at them and sighing because I’m not quite sure where to go with them, or at least, what the next step should be.

Anyway, since I’ve spent longer on this than I intended, let’s get into Random Notes.

  • Quick update on where I am with writing projects:
    • The Holy Fool – now in “pre-publication.” That’s about as specific as I can get for now, but I will update everyone as soon as events merit it.
    • The American Nine – In second draft format, with at least two deeper revisions pending. Due to my need to keep the draft under 100,000 words, I think I have ideas for two other books that would make this a trilogy.
    • We Can Be You… – finished looking over the rough draft and making cuts to overly long scenes. The rough draft is now somewhere around 30,000 words – I’m now considering finishing it and shooting for a 90,000- word manuscript, with other material that was part of the book being part of two later sequels.
  • I want to thank everyone who has been visiting my blog recently, especially those that visiting this recent post. It’s nice to see people visit – feel free to comment as well.
  • In case you are wondering, the Volume I posts involving the Writer’s Biographies cover my life as a kid getting interested in writing, and Volume II includes my time as a younger writer, before the recent revival and production of my interest in writing. If there is a Volume III to those Biography pieces, those would cover what has happened with my writing in recent years. However, I think there might be at least a couple Volume I and Volume II posts left to write, too. [EDIT: I have created a new category, Biography, on the right-hand side of the blog. All of the Writer’s Biography posts can be found there.]
  • Depending on circumstances, I might be able to put together another midweek post as well as the regular journal entry.

That’s it for now. I’ll write some more later.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume II, Part 4: Reviving An Old Writing Project

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Writing Journal/Random Notes, 4.22.2018: Consistent but a little quiet

So, I was checking my writing totals, and… they’re not too much different from last week – a little lower, but pretty consistent. Those totals:

+899 words written (blogging).

Days writing: 2 out of 7.

Days revising: 4 out of 7 for 150 total minutes.

Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 5 out of 7 days.

And there we go. Not much to say about them, but some context with the numbers:

  • All the written words are in blogs, which I started counting recently. It’s probably going to be a while until I get out of the revising mode and into brand new draft writing.
  • My revising has been on both my projects and a beta read for a member of my local writing group, Writers On The Avenue. I’m hoping to do more of this for people.
  • This summer, I’m hoping some members of my group will be willing to beta read The American Nine. However, when I send it to the group, I will have to emphasize the fact that this material could be considered TV-MA, NC-17-type material (to be fair, romance novels are getting pretty explicit nowadays). Writers who prefer to write about religious or Christian themes are likely not going to get into the material, which I totally understand. Maybe I need to put this on the manuscripts when I email them out?
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OK, then! Random Notes time:

  • For those interested in my actual writing, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction work not written specifically for this site, I’ve added a new category to the blog, My Writing. Just click on the handy folder link on the right side of the blog (or this link right here) and it will take you right to those pieces, if you are curious about them.
  • Real life often seems up in the air right now. I tend not to discuss a lot of personal life stuff here, but right now it appears that there is much waiting around for things to happen. Two big events are the fact that the last of my two kids will be graduating from high school in two years, and the fact that my wife is currently running for office. (Most of you probably wouldn’t be affected because it’s just our local legislative district, but here’s her site if you’re curious.) As a result of these and a few other things, I’m in the situation of having no idea what my life will look like two years from now. It’s an intriguing situation.
  • I’ve got a couple of blog post ideas coming up – another one on my series of posts about revising, and getting into what that revived book project I was reconsidering looks like. You’ll probably see those within this week.

That’s it for now; more later.

100th Post

I wasn’t quite sure I would make it this far. Remember how it all started?

under_construction

 

Well, it got on track after that.

 

As much as I have claimed to be, or aspire to be, a writer, for a good portion of my life, I don’t believe that I lived up to that claim fairly well. There was a time when I started a blog, several years back, on Blogger. Don’t bother looking for it; I wrote it under an Internet handle, never ID’d myself, and took it down years before my kids ever got into middle school.

 

As I’ve discussed, consistent writing and myself until very recently have not been close companions. Such was the case with the infamous first blog. I’d post happily every day for a week or two, then just forget about the whole thing for another two weeks. I’d post about every eccentricity that came into my head and got into the bare bones basics of HTML programming to get everything looking nice. And I didn’t even realize that pretty soon there would be a lot of options for plug and play blogging before too long.

 

I have to say that I like the ease of operations of the WordPress platform for what I do a little more than what Blogger had for me. I like the ease of me being able to cross-post to other social media platforms and its ease of use. I also like being able to track and follow other blogs as well, but I forget if Blogger had anything similar except for RSS readers.(NOTE: If anyone has a suggestion as to whether I should change up the design of the site, let me know. I might keep it this way for a little longer.

 

I think this blog has become a symbol of the type of focus that I wanted to bring to my writing at the start of this process. I stayed modestly ambitious yet strongly focused on what I wanted this blog to be. I might occasionally spout off on my personal social media about things that bother me on a political level, but I’ve decided to keep this page largely free from politics, although there are a lot of political elements and themes to my books. I’ve kept this dedicated to the writing craft and my journey as a writer, and it has been liberating to try and filter my online presence so that I’m not so much in the muck of the political and cultural combat. That’s even though the main characters of my recent books would certainly have something to say about the issues of the day.

 

I’ve also stayed consistent with my writing. Even though those weekly writing journals seem to make up a large portion of the past 99 blog entries, they’ve been important in many ways. They have been personal celebrations of how well I was doing on my writing as well as personal postmortems on how things could have gotten better. I said from the beginning that this was as much of a way to track my own progress and output as a writer as it was a way to reach out to other writers, share my thoughts and, eventually, promote my own fiction. Even though sometimes it has only been a weekly blog about what I wrote that week, it was more consistent that any writing I’ve ever done up to this date.

 

I’m proud of that, and I’m also proud of making it to 100 blogs. I’ll be looking forward to my one-year anniversary on this blog and the next 100 blogs, for starters.

Writing Journal/Random Notes 4.15.2018: Next steps

Hmmmm, the free WordPress media library helps out quite a bit when I’m stuck for picture ideas.

Anyway, to the weekly totals:

+1,413 words written (blog).

Days writing: 2 out of 7.

Days revising: 4 out of 7 for 150 total minutes.

Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 5 out of 7 days.

That’s… somewhat more impressive than what I was expecting, considering that I was taking some break time after finishing the rough draft and first revision for The American Nine.

Just a few Random Notes, then:

  • This isn’t going to be too long, to start off with. I’m getting on with some work projects that have to finished up by this weekend. There’s some other odds and ends, but that’s about all I’ll say on the subject for the moment.
  • Anyway, I previously suggested that I was considering new projects, or some revived projects. That is coming into clearer focus, giving me more projects down the pipe than what I thought I had. The one project I had in mind seems to be more of a revival than a new project. However, I think I am going to wait and give that project its own entry and attention.
  • It seems like I’m waiting a bit for new news to come out about me and movement on certain fronts. However, long wait times are par for the course when it comes to books.
  • This is blog post #99 for me on Liegois Media, so I will do my darnedest to get out a special #100 post sometime this week. It will probably be a retrospective, but I’ll likely save the choicest recollections for the one-year anniversary blog post this summer. 🙂

That’s it and done – more later.

Microsoft Word and Google Docs: Moving from one to the other?

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Writing Journal/Random Notes 4.8.2018: A lull before the new action

It was a slog this week. Here it is:

+0 words written.

Days writing: 0  out of 7.

Days revising: 3out of 7 for 300  total minutes.

Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 3 out of 7 days.

Well, I did say I was going to take it easy this week.

Is it good news that I’m just getting antsy if I just take time off? Maybe that’s for the best. I think that I really don’t know what to do with myself when I am not working on a project, which is such a better feeling that just sitting on my butt for years at a time.

So, what am I doing? I read through one person’s work in my writing circles; now I’m going to do another one of those, although that process will take longer. I want to keep poking around on The American Nine, even if I don’t do too much with it at the moment. There’s at least two or three projects I could revive that I still have passion for at various levels.

I want to keep writing, even if it’s rubbish. And that’s a good feeling.

[UPDATED: I also went to my Facebook writing groups to get their input on the question I asked before of whether to count my blogging writing toward my writing totals. General consensus is that it should be counted. So, as of the next writing journal, those totals will go into the count.]

Random Notes!

  • Going to get at least another mid-week post out. It’s one of those that’s been hanging around for a while, so I’ll be happy to get it out the chute.
  • I think I have social media posts covered until… the end of the month? So, that’s a good feeling.
  • I’m dealing with what I think is a pinched nerve in my neck. I might have to consider changing sleeping positions, writing positions, etc. It will be nice when this sorts itself out or my new chiro does.
  • I will talk eventually regarding what The Holy Fool’s publication status is. Right now… it appears there’s some movement on that front. As soon as there’s product, you’ll be the first to know, faithful readers.

That’s it for an admittedly boring week! I’ll have more to read about later, promise.

 

A Very Quick Note…

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On Revising (Part 2)

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Writing Journal/Random Notes, 4.1.2018: Special Easter Edition, yada yada…

OK, Spring Break for me has been a lot of time at home, but a relaxing time. Also, it’s been a great time to get revising done. To the weekly totals:

0+ words written.

Days writing: 0 out of 7.

Days revising: 5 out of 7 for 600 total minutes.

Daily writing goals met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 5 out of 7 days.

A slight improvement on the number of minutes revising, but one extra day I decided to screw around on. So, what does that mean for what I have been working on?

As it turns out, I am almost finished with the first revision of my rough draft. This is simply me reviewing the work for any continuity errors, such as what might occur when I change the names of people or organizations halfway through the book.

I’m also looking for the ability to cut any unnecessary wording or sentences. I think I’ll have to run that revision piece soon, because the only thing that comes close to writing something cool is cutting out an entire paragraph of material and realizing that I didn’t need it.

OK, let’s move on to Random Notes:

  • We are hosting Easter this year, so it might be a little bit of chaos today; that’s why I wanted to get this post out early. There will be some other posts this week, I am hoping.
  • I was glad with my progress during Spring Break, as I hadn’t expected to not only finish up my first draft, but get well into my first revision as well.
  • As for this week, it may be a situation where after I finish the first revision of the work in progress, I may let it sit for a week or so before taking another look at it. I am now tempted to pick up work on another WIP that I started thinking about last year to pass the time.
  • I’m not at the point where I feel I can announce anything, but… I did plan to have The Holy Fool published at some point this year. This is going to happen. When things get more solid, I will let everyone know and I’ll give people the opportunity to pick up a copy. I think it is past time for me to publish something if I am going to insist on calling myself a writer and continue to write a writing blog.
  • Somewhere last week I hit the 50-subscriber mark to this blog. Thanks to everyone that follows me and who is keeping up with what I’m doing; I appreciate all my readers.
  • There is a good chance that this April will see the 100th post on this blog. I’m surprised it’s gone this far, but proud that I’ve stuck with it like I have.

That’s it for now; more later.