Friday Rants and Raves - June 13

[sarillia]

Hello all! It's Friday the 13th today! I hear it's also a full moon tonight. Hope none of you are too superstitious.

Anyway, how's the writing coming?

This time our picture is Elihu Vedder's Questioner of The Sphinx. And it should work, unlike last time

Comments

[sarillia]

I am trying to finish up a short story so I can send it out to my beta readers. I really want to move on to this next step but first I need to clean up my first draft. My chronic illnesses have been acting up though and I've been unbelievably tired. I feel so lazy because it's not like I have anything else to do. I'm not in school at the moment and I don't have a job. The one thing I have to do is something that I think is fun and it's not getting done because I'm too busy sleeping and lying around doing nothing.

[inkdust]

I hate having nothing else taking up my time and STILL not getting writing done. I hope your body gives you a break soon so you can finish your draft!

[ayumidah]

Eh the writing is going so-so. I'm making some progress, it's just not been a great week with few writing opportunities. The one night I was planning on doing nothing but write, the basement started leaking in half a dozen places again but it's caulked up now so hopefully I will never have that problem as bad again... HAHAH. Eh.

I hope to be able to spend more of next week on finishing up some long backburnered projects.

[sarillia]

Do I remember you mentioning a leak keeping you from writing before or am I thinking of someone else?

Either way, I'm glad it's fixed now. Hopefully you can get some stuff done soon.

[ayumidah]

Yeah that was me, haha. Both times major leaks have happened, I've had my laptop in the basement for some peace and quiet so I could write just for a waterfall to spring behind me. It's crazy, haha. I hope so too, thanks!

[inkdust]

I'm slogging along at the moment. I like going out and doing fun things during the day, but I hate how my routine gets thrown off. The rest of this week has been very productive, so I'll excuse myself for not getting as much done today but I want to at least do some. I've figured out that this third draft is really about giving each scene and chapter the amount of time and number of read-throughs that it needs, which is creating something noticeably better but is also frustrating.

[sarillia]

I hope the end product is worth the slog. I'm sure it will be.

I really want to get to that point with my current project.

[inkdust]

No matter how much I've heard it said, it's still striking to me how much comes down to time and work. And the slog, which is what I'm now going to call the combination of time + work.

[inevitableentresol]

Nice picture. Usually they don't work for me for some reason.

I do like that pic. It's great at provoking immediate back story.

[sarillia]

I'm glad you like it. Maybe you should check out some of Vedder's other work. He's a symbolist, which is a genre of painting that I like to use for this sort of thing, along with the surrealists.

[inevitableentresol]

I did and I like that one with the Roc's egg.

[splinteredstar]

This week was the last week of my four week Differential Equations course, so I have done nothing but stare at my math and invent new swear words to use at it.

However, I am now home and free for the rest of the summer, more or less. So I am going to write up a list of all the projects I want to work on! Planning on doing an edit on a draft, or maybe just start a new draft. Haven't decided.

[sarillia]

I hope your course went well at least. I'm sure you'll figure out what to do with that draft now that you're home.

[splinteredstar]

Yeah, I did some brainstorming last night and I think I have a better grasp of the theme. Except now I have to figure out how to reframe my characters to fit. Then again, maybe trying to frame Death in terms of human psychological development is doomed to fail....

[serria]

Need to STOP idea hopping! I keep getting the beginnings of new story ideas in my head, and get excited and waste a few days mapping them out in my head. Then realize, I don't really have a story idea per se - I was just massively obsessed with a character or two that developed in my head, a relationship, a line of dialogue, a single scene or plot point. I need to focus on the stories I have mapped out and put tons of work into. Which, I've also managed to do a bit of this week, so it wasn't a total waste.

[sarillia]

I have that habit too. I actually came up with a system for determining which ones were fully-realized ideas and which ones were just vague premises. I'm glad you managed to focus on something though.

[splinteredstar]

Gah, I do that too. It's an attention span thing for me - when I can, I switch stories. When I focus on one story, I switch pov's every thousand words or so. (Not joking.)

Well at least you have characters stored up for the future?