Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Work, work, work.

                I haven’t updated my blog in a while…guess it’s time to remedy that.

                Most of the reason for the delay is work.  The greenhouse has kept me on past two staff cuts, so now my survival is week to week instead of month to month.  I’ve stepped up the job search and applied to multiple libraries across the state, and gotten some suggestions of library-related employment from WLPL where I volunteer.

                Because of all the work, I have not been writing.  With it being summer—in all its heat and humidity glory—I have no energy when I get home at night for any sort of inspiration.  I also haven’t been reading much, as said elements make me very tired so I rest every spare moment I get.

                What I have read I haven’t been recording.  The same with some of the writing I’ve gotten down.

                Dan has been away for two weeks training for his job, which has left me a lot of time to think and evaluate.  We talk on IMer most nights to catch up on daily adventures—such as my computer crashing last night, only four days after the warranty expired; good news, it’s all backed up on the 2TB external my sister and brother-in-law bought me for my birthday.  I also copied my writing files and installed them on the external to be on the safe side.

                On Dan’s suggestion, I’ve started focusing on my rather hefty A New Breed of Warrior rework off my “goals” list.   Originally it was just supposed to be a slight retouching of the sections I’ve already written, but since my writing style has improved and changed  so much in the time since the last rework was started, I need to do a full overhaul.  That puts a lot more pressure on me this year, and Dan thought it best I start whittling away at it.  I went with his suggestion because I was tossing ideas around as to what to throw my focus on—I only have to do about half a chapter to get to my Sunfall goal for the year, and have absolutely no idea how long it would take me to reach Brink’s given I can’t get the characters to talk to me.  I asked Dan which story off my goals list he would be interested in reading, and he suggested New Breed.

                Because I don’t take my computer with me to work, but I have an hour lunch break, I dropped by the back-to-school aisle at the grocery store while getting lunch late last week and bought a couple college-rule notebooks, a pair of my favorite pens, and set myself to brainstorm.  Since I can’t seem to get ideas to finish the first chapter (Dix’s creation and beginning of training), I started thinking about the start of the second (Wolfsong’s nightmare and the status of the mercenaries).

                While I liked the premise of the original chapter I’d written, it just seemed to be too slow at the start, with too much information and not as engaged as I would prefer.  It needed to be more visceral.  I needed to feel Wolfsong’s confusion, terror, and loss better than how I’d written it before.  There’s a lot of information in that chapter I still want, but more compact and integral rather than stated.

                Fresh notebooks and pens have always been one of the best ways to stir inspiration for me, so I wound up getting a considerably better start on the chapter than its original.  Dan is reading both the original and the rework.

                I’m debating  about using my National Novel Writing Month time this year to focus on New Breed’s rework instead of coming up with something new or different.  The intensive span would be good.  Unfortunately, one of the official requirements is that you’re not writing something you’ve already written (translation: you can’t use it for rework).  So I don’t know if I’ll just unofficially use NaNoWriMo, or if I’ll get my rework material done and then focus on the sections in between for the month.  November’s still a ways away, though, so I’ll have a better idea in time.