Off the hook

My current writing exercise is about having the characters speak for themselves. One is writing letters. They aren't likely to ever reach their destination, but he writes them anyway. Another makes inventory lists from memory. Between the lines, she writes diary entries. I have to figure out why.

The third character in that party is mostly illiterate, so I have to do something different with him.

One of my characters is a person who knows. When he and his friends become afflicted with various kinds of magic, he will be able to foretell the future (to a degree). Now I'm trying to think of a way to foreshadow that. What is typical about a person who knows?

Perhaps he's very sensitive to change? That could work.

I have ordered some new crossword magazines. I was getting tired of the old ones. (But I still find new things in them, occasionally, after a couple of years. So I consider them very good)

I have finally started to use the greenhouse.

I have prepared a bit of the plot for chard and beets. It turned out I had no seeds for carrots or onions though. but that can be fixed.

I have instructed seven enthusiastic kids in archery. By myself. Well, there were a couple of parents.

I have written a little...

I'm being picky with my writing.

Sometimes being slightly busy helps, sometimes it doesn't. This time all the important singing around Easter made it ebb out almost completely. Anyway: 186 words today. More tomorrow, I really hope.

Edit: Heh. look at the id of this (dw) post...

During the last few days, I have painstakingly put together a scene of about 1500 words. I'm quite pleased with the length -- I have far too many scenes that end after a couple of hundred words. I still think it needs more work, especially the last two paragraphs, but it does approximately what I intended. The characters mostly stand around talking, but their circumstances change, and they made them change.

Now I have to make up my mind about the next scene.

And it took hours before I realised how strange it sounded.

I have never before seen the river run this close to the bridge

I wonder what the bridge was for?

I'm writing a bizarre little story about sheep. Sometimes it's good to take oneself not very seriously.

At least they are smart sheep. Australian, actually.

Writing takes its toll. You don't have to do a full nano to start making peculiar mistakes -- I struggle daily with the 750 words required for novel-in-90.

Today I intended to write 'handtag' (handle), and instead found myself having written 'handfat' (basin, sink). Easily fixed, of course. Then I started to ponder the worldbuilding possibilities.

The door had no basin... M offered some assistance, and together we arrived at a society where you have to wash your hands every time you go though a door. The handles are actually *in* the basin. There are two of them, far enough apart so that you can't turn them both with one hand. And they don't work unless there's water and soap in the basin.

Now, throw some multi-limbed aliens into this world.

Informal update:

I have written a total of twelve words (in English) of Blood Magic.

Considering how quickly my attempts to write regularly have failed in the past two years, I'm going to set a very modest goal: I will look at the story every day. If I feel like it, I will also write. If I don't like what I wrote yesterday, I will remove it (or rewrite it).

In other news I have also typeset some music: a couple of bars of a song we sing in the choir, and which I have attempted to make a choir arrangement of.

Tonight I happened to recall a song (by Povel Ramel) about a man who has been writing the same song for ten years. We used to have a recording of it, and I liked it immensely at the age of... maybe ten to early teens. The poor man complains that he can't finish, that he's lost among the notes, that his family sent a cake to remind him of the day they left. It occurred to me that the song describes my situation perfectly: lost among the notes words.

I'm trying to go back to the stories I originally wanted to write, and I find that there's very little left of them. Where has the war gone, that was looming over Kiat and the others? Where is Sedrion's desire for revenge? What happened, in the end, to the expedition in the space opera, and how are Grete and Emilia related?

Usually, I write by picking up a thread and following it. As you might guess, I end up with a tangle of different threads that don't go very well together. Also, I tend to miss the important scenes, the conclusions, the explanations -- I suspect my writing is completely incomprehensible for anyone who isn't me.

I wonder if it would work for me to write the crucial scenes first, and then add whatever threads are needed to make it hang together? I can see several problems: fx where do the scenes actually start? Maybe I can write them from the middle and out?

Another method that I thought of: divide the story into a number of parts, and write at most five thousand words of each part. That could give me a very rough draft in a couple of months.