Speaking of Dialog

Lots of dialog written today. It's definitely going to need some polishing and cleaning. Currently it's mostly the dialog itself without many tags or descriptors to flesh it out. I was just trying to get the flow and pacing right. I'm going to have to seriously come back to some of these story elements and tweak and retouch them, today's dialog almost got away from me and went off on a tangent. Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not a good thing when trying to stick to an outline.

I'm still nailing about 1200 words a sitting, then giving myself a break by rereading what I've written and trying to not be disgusted with some of it.

Quite the eventful day, Monster won the third hockey game of her first round of Playoffs, eliminating the other team and moving onto the next round. She's turning into quite the solid little Goaltender. She stopped 3 break-away's cold in their tracks. I'm quite proud of her.

Back on the subject of dialog. My youngest daughter, Bear (I assure you, that's a nickname, we wouldn't shackle our child with such a moniker) has begun the "Why?" phase of toddler-hood. For those not familiar, out of the 6 of you who actually read this blog on occassion, when I spam you with the link, the "Why?" phase is where the little darling answers every instruction, request, or statement with "Why?".

The key is that they actually expect an answer, and will not be satisfied with something as banal as "Because I bloody well said so!", which has been known to work quite well with tweens and teenagers alike. Nope, this little 2 year old cherub actually requires an answer. Lately I find myself having to think of "why" I ask her to do things far more than is comfortable.

"Bear, it's time for bed."

"Why?"

"Well, because, um, you're tired, and I'm tired and we'll both be a lot less grumpy if you go to bed now."

"Ok. Nite nite Daddy."

Nite nite indeed.

-Grimm

Writing Priority

I'm considering myself on contract with my potential readers. I intend to hold up my end of the deal and have been working to take my writing more seriously and dedicate more time to it. I'm trying to form the habit of writing, which can be quite tricky to do in a house full of people while they aren't all sleeping.

I've nearly completely stopped playing World of Warcraft, not specifically because of writing, but I do find that I get a lot of the enjoyment that I used to get playing from writing. The magic allure of the game just doesn't seem to be there so much any more. I'll log in from time to time, more to be social than to actually play it. Don't get me wrong, it's still a fantastic game and the stories in it are marvelous, I'm just having a much richer experience with a word processor at the moment. My subscription to World of Warcraft is set to not renew in mid March just before I go on my work trip to London England. I'm back from England for a week before I head on vacation, so I may not renew til mid to late April, if then.

I've been going to the gym on a nearly daily basis, it's in the office I work my paying job out of, so I clearly can't go on days that I'm not in the office, but for the past three weeks I've gone a minimum of 4 days a week. And I'm keeping fairly active and stretching on the days I'm not in the gym. I find I have more energy on the days I work out than I do on the days I don't. I also spend a lot of my gym time thinking about writing. You know, when I'm not thinking "just a little more", or "i think i'm dying", or "damn i'm out of shape" during the various exercises. Still, it feels good.

I've been attempting to put in at least 2 hours a day, and I'm aiming for about 500 words an hour that I can live with. I often write about 900 words an hour, but only keep 500 of them, so it's working out.

What I'm writing is still very rough work for BookB and will require several revisions before I'm happy enough with it to let anyone see it. It has to have some detail added, stilted dialog knocked on it's ass, and flow cleaned up. I think it's more important to tell the story just now, then make it, you know, enjoyable and complete as the next process.

All in all, i'm loving writing. I may never get published, but it's not as much about the destination as it's about enjoying the journey.

That's not to say i don't want to be published though ;)

-Grimm

Plots within Plots

I'm having a good time writing BookB. I'm thoroughly enjoying the process, though I'm not getting as much pushed out per day/week/month as I'd like, I'm progressing at least. I'm not sure I'll meet my Dec 31st deadline for a readable draft, but I do intend to give a good go at it.

I've started fleshing out the early scenes of the story, and in doing so and getting more comfortable with some of the characters I'm tweaking and adjusting my outline to fit in more side-story. I often wonder if my process is vastly different from the writers I look up to or whether some of their stories go through similar creative iterations.

Do professional writers just hatch out full-on stories ever? Or is it always a process of changes and tweaks I wonder. Either way, this is what's sort of working for me, and I imagine I'll get more of a clean process the more I do. Right now this is just a real voyage of discovery for me, and I'm enjoying the ride.

Now if only I could manage to get a good clean night's sleep and have a night where I can write without all the little distractions I give myself. I guess those are parts of my process I have to work on.

Anyway, I've got some humour, some good emotion, and I think tonight I wrote a wonderfully awkward scene for a few of my characters.

Alright, sleep time.