Current mood:

busy

Experimental writing

And another query letter has gone out today. Good. You never know when one of them might just do the trick. Or not. But it's kind of fun game to give it a try.

Russ is going to be home this next weekend. This is unexpected -- first, that he would be home again so soon, and second that he's daring to try to make it on a holiday. Holidays have not been our friends for the last year and a half. If all goes well, we'll have three full days together. Yay! Funds are tight, but we should be able to have some fun!

Draw the Line is still moving along at its little 500 words a day pace. Odd way to write. I don't think I'll be doing it again, though it was a good experiment to try once. The problem is that the story meanders too much. It never really gets to the point -- any point, really -- and this is because of a two-fold problem. The first is that I'm not allowing myself to run with the story as I normally would, so I just get moving on something and then leave it for about 24 hours and by the time I come back, I'm not always able to pick up the real feel for what I was doing. The second is that, though I have pages and pages of notes, I did not do more than a few lines of outline.

This was all a purposeful experiment to see if changing the way I worked changed what I wrote. It has, and not for the better.

I am going to stick with it for a while longer, though. It is possible that part of the problem is attitude. I also plan to write out a little bit more outline and see if I can get some real direction in the story. I'm not interested in writing -- or reading -- that never really gets anywhere.

I will have to do some extensive work with the story if I ever really do reach an ending. (grin)    I think I'm going to end up outlining from the original, saving all the good spots -- there are some really nice bits -- and then see if I can rework it into something a bit more complex and coherent.

But that's later work. I may find, when I get it done, that it has a lot more going for it than I think. That's happened before.

Experimentation in writing is good. Otherwise, al you are ever going to do is tell the same story and never grow.    Even when it doesn't work as well as you thought it might, it can teach you something about how your work and what to avoid in the future.

The other work is going fine, by the way. I'm about to finish a short story today, I think. So, off I go to get it done!