Update

I completely fell off the writing wagon. I think I hit my head as I fell. When I awoke, the wagon was gone and I was lost in the darkness. I have not written anything in a couple of weeks - since the day before my last blog post in fact. Apparently my muse stayed on the wagon and now I have lost her (or him - I'm not really sure.)

I am not overly stressed about this. Technically I'm a month ahead of schedule for my 100 words per day.

So I'm just going to wait for my muse to show back up with the wagon. Surely they will realize I am gone eventually.

In the mean time, I have been reading and doing some modeling. Perhaps I will post some of that eventually.

Tonight I'm going to try something new

This is probably a bad idea.

In fact the more I think about it the worse the idea sounds.

I was thinking about stepping back from my main writing project and working on a little short story I started writing a while back. I came across it and liked what I had written. It made me feel good and that was a nice feeling since I've been thinking about how shitty my writing is lately.

However, as I type this I know its not a good idea. I need to push through with my novella and not get distracted. So no matter what, I'm going to continue to get my 100 words per day written on that.

Maybe I can use this like a reward system. Like, I can only work on the short story if I have already done my 100 words of novella writing. That might work.

It was nice to reread something I had written and feel good about writing it though. I need more moments like that.

Reading update: I'm currently in the middle of two of the books on the list. In the mornings at the gym I am listening to The Last Unicorn on Audible. At night I am reading The Guns of Avalon (book two of the Chronicles of Amber).

A small bit of progress

I wrote last night. It wasn't much, a little more than 100 words, but I wrote.

I think perhaps I got a bit full of myself, trying to increase my words per day beyond what I was truly capable. When I started this goal of writing, I think I knew this already, which is why I originally settled on 100 pages a day.

Now that I have come back to myself, I will continue writing at a slower pace, I think, only writing what I think I am able.

I'm in a rut

I did not write last night. That makes three days in a row. I think part of it is the fear that what I've already written is garbage. I feel good about small moments of it, but I know there are problems in the story. I think I can fix them, but I guess I'm just scared.

I am also concerned that I'm going to put the time in to finish the story and it's going to end up being much shorter than I first imagined. I was hoping to write at least a novella, so about 20,000 - 35,000 words. That seems like a goodish length to charge people money for. Shorter than that and I feel that the story probably does not have enough depth.

What I have discovered is that stories are not about plot. They are about characters. Right now my characters have come to realize that my original plot was not well enough thought out.

I'm going to take some more notes today and hopefully find my muse tonight.

Weekend of Disapointment

I am ashamed.

So on Friday I wrote about my plan to write this weekend. I wrote nothing. I did not even open my writing program. I could write about everything that I accomplished this weekend, and list all the excuses for not writing that I told myself, but I will not subject you to it. The bottom line is I failed. I prioritized other things, put them ahead of my dreams.

I need to stop doing that because my dreams deserve better.

I did play a game of Warhammer 40k with my Daemon army. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn't thinking, and I forgot to take pictures. I will try to remember for next time. Speaking of Warhammer, I found out that the codex for the Thousand Suns Chaos Marines is coming out next weekend, so I'm excited about that. They will probably be my next army. I can't seem to get into anything that isn't Chaos. Maybe that says something about me.

So that was my weekend of failure, but let's not dwell on the past. Progress, not perfection.

Back to writing tonight!

Throughout the day and during lunch, I'm going to plot out what I will write tonight. Last time I did that it worked out great, and I ended up writing about 700 words in an hour.

New Computer & New Software

First some backstory.

I own a computer, a PC. It's a rather nice one that I build with a friend of mine a few years ago. It cost me about $1500 in parts, so it was probably a $3000 computer if I had bought it on the market. I had built it to play games on, such is the labor of youth (I've aged a lot in the last couple of years).

When first began trying to write a couple of years ago, my computer was in our bedroom, which was a good place to write. It was on one end of the house and far enough from the living room that I would not hear the television as long as the door was closed.

However, a few months ago we moved all of the gaming devices into the living room, the computer included. This put a damper on my writing. I can't write there. It's the center of the house with lots of traffic and of course the televisions (two of them!) are in there.

I started writing on my iPad together with a bluetooth keyboard. It was functional, but hardly ideal. In fact it was getting to be a pain in the ass.

I told you all of that to tell you this:

This week I ordered a MacBook Air laptop. I had to increase my credit limit on my Amazon credit card to buy it, but those are the kind of tough choices you have to make when you are chasing your dreams.

It arrived last night and I love it.

I got it set up and downloaded Scrivener, a writing program I have been looking forward to trying. It is amazing. I will definitely be writing about this program in the near future, so look forward to that.

I only got about 200 words written because it took a while to get everything organized and to get my work imported into the system, but I was expecting that. I had considered not writing at all, and had planned not to, but I knew in my heart that was a mistake. So I wrote.

I'm sitting at about 5200 words right now, averaging 584 per day. I think I squandered an opportunity last weekend that I will not repeat this weekend. I should be able to write 2000 words each day on the weekends, even if it takes me a few hours to plow through it, so that's what I'm going to do.

Also I started reading a couple of books from my 2018 reading list. I already owned the second book of the Prince of Amber series (I read the first a while ago), and I downloaded The Last Unicorn on Audible to listen to while at the gym. I am on my way!

I will try to update the blog this weekend, but we will see.

Books to read 2018

This morning I was at the gym with my wife (see I really am working on those resolutions!). I was on the treadmill listening to an audio-book of Stephen King's On Writing, and he mentions the importance of reading. It makes sense; how can you expect to be a writer if you don't read?

So I decided to make an effort to read a lot more this year. I guess this is an amendment to my list of resolutions, but its my blog and I can do things like that. Anyway, this afternoon I run across a blog post by one of my favorite authors (indeed one of my favorite people), Patrick Rothfuss (ok, he's my hero). In this blog he posts a list of books/series that have influenced him. I thought, "Wow, how handy is that?"

So here is the list (I struck-through the ones that I have previously read). I plan to begin knocking these out posthaste:

1. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
2. The Last Unicorn By Peter S. Beagle
3. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
4. Stranger In a Strange Land Robert Heinlein
5. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
6. The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
7. Dragonriders Of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
8. Dune by Frank Herbert
9. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
10. The Discworld books by Terry Pratchett
11. The Chronicles of Amber–Roger Zelazny
12. Brave New World–Aldous Huxley
13. Wizard of Earthsea By Le Guin
14. Sandman  – Neil Gaiman
15. The Fisher King Trilogy by Tim Powers
16. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy by Douglas Adams
17. The Riddlemaster of Hed series by Patricia McKillip
18. Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P Lovecraft
19. Neuromancer by William Gibson
20. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
21. 1984 – by George Orwell
22. Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson
23. Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare
24. The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart
25. The Princess Bride – William Goldman
26. The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
27. Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
28. The Odyssey by Homer
29. The Last Herald-Mage trilogy – Mercedes Lackey
30. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
31. River World Series – Phillip Jose Farmer
32. One Thousand and One Nights
33. Riftwar Saga by Feist
34. The Dark Tower series – Stephen King
35. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
36. Belgariad series by David Eddings
37. Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
38. Michael Ende – The Neverending Story
39. The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
40. The Shannara Trilogy – Terry Brooks