I suppose I should actually write a post this week.
I've spent much of the past four days working on the first ten thousand words of a new novel and successfully avoiding my linguistics class projects. Today I presented on that linguistics project. Don't worry: it went well. I only procrastinate until the last possible minute, not beyond.
Writing this blog post is another means of procrastinating on the written part of the project. Though, by the time this "runs" on Thursday morning I will have finished writing so no need to leave me scornful, mother-like comments about getting back to work. I know, I'm sucking all the fun out of it ;)
Working on the novel has been delightful. It's a "commercial" (i.e. not literary) project but it's happy. I've developed a pattern that has worked extremely well over the past few days. In the afternoon I print out the last half page of the text, then that evening I continue the scene or start the next one by writing it out long hand on the print out page. This gives me a quick edit of the typed text and it also means that the next morning when I go to type it up I have a "running start" for finishing my daily goal of 1000 words.
Someone recently reminded me that Stephen King in his memoir On Writing (which I really need to finish one of these days), says that the first draft of a novel should not take more than three months to write, otherwise the story gets stale in the mind of the author and that staleness translates into the writing. Editing that draft may take forever, but the first one should make it's debut in a heated rush. [I'll leave you to create your own similes and double entendres to follow that statement.]
This week's writing in The Artist's Way deals primarily with shame and anger. Shame that others inflict on us for being creative and "outside the box" of their perceptions and noting the anger we feel as indicative of what is really the matter. No, we don't act on our anger in society (most of the time) but we shouldn't dismiss that anger as irrational or unimportant because there had to be something that triggered it. Just because a hay bale seems to spontaneously combust does not mean that there was not a legitimate reason for the bale to go up in flames.
(Oxidization of wet hay in the center of a tightly bound bale spikes the internal temperature. I did a report on it in eighth grade science.)
I've been thinking about it but, as anger is not socially appropriate to air no matter how wonderfully introspective it is. And I'm really itching to just blab it all. Damn politeness.
