No writing yesterday. The wedding on Sunday went beautifully; a lovely ceremony where the more typical readings and celebrant speeches were replaced pretty much entirely with letters from the bride and groom to their parents and stories of the two both growing up and their relationship from the point of view of family and friends (which is not only frankly a far more interesting and engaging ceremony than I've seen before, but also meant that, when it came time for the dreaded speeches at the reception, the speeches didn't have to include any more funny stories of the bride or groom, and could be just variations on a theme of thanking the people involved, and be over and done with in under five minutes. Best idea ever).
It was, however, an unbelievably long day for the wedding party. Up at 5am for hair and makeup and photos, continuing through until the wedding finally wound down well after midnight. I spent fifteen hours solid in five-inch heels and my feet are still informing me of this fact. Add to that an unfortunately necessary early start on Monday morning, as my boyfriend had to be in a town on the other side of the state by 11am, and Monday was pretty much a blur of recovery and napping.
Write comment (0 Comments)No NaNo post.
Today is my beloved brother's wedding, and I just want to wish him and his new wife the most heartfelt congratulations, and welcome my new sister to the family. Love you guys, may you find happiness and love with each other always.
Write comment (0 Comments)Halfway through NaNoWriMo. I spent today doing various writing-things in somewhat recovery from extreme over-peopling, wishing my neighbours would stop reminding me they existed with infuriating things like talking and laughter. I did also start to transcribe the draft I just finished, but after completing a couple of pages, realised that I had drastically underestimated the number of written words to a page, and the story is well over the limit for the anthology it was intended for.
Which is not a huge problem--I still have one story I can submit--I'll just put the transcription and editing of that one aside for a while. If anything, it's a relief, being one less thing I have to worry about this month, especially given an end as messy as that one probably means I need to spend a good amount of time thinking about what went wrong.
So, halfway through, two for ten. However, by my new (more accurate) words-per-page count, I've written just over 15,000 words in the past 15 days, which isn't bad at all, given more than half my usual writing days have been lost to social things.
Write comment (0 Comments)Almost halfway! No update today from me (and a post written in advance) as today, I will be taking my future sister-in-law on her epic hen's night (well, lunch-afternoon-night) to end all hen's nights. Lunch, bowling, spa, dinner, movie, all over the CBD and Camberwell (because you'd be amazed how hard it is to find a decent hen's night movie in the evening at the moment) it's a whole thing, it's all happening, here we go.
Tomorrow, though: words. Words will happen. They may not be new words, as I desperately need to revise a piece to submit it, and transcribe the piece I finished yesterday, but words will happen!
Write comment (0 Comments)Draft zero! That's two stories down, this one clocking in at just under 7000 words (which makes me worry it'll actually be over the limit for the anthology it's intended for.) Tonight's draft finished with possibly the single worst ending sentence I've ever written in my life, but that's okay, it's a weird ending. Two days ago, I knew exactly what this story was doing, it was fun and vibrant and it felt like it was working, just working. But something changed--shifting into Act 3, my purpose faded. The story suddenly seemed not a sequence of keyed changes, but a series of increasingly bad decisions on the part of the character. Which is not in itself a bad thing, but it can bode ill for the pace, especially in a short story.
By the end, I'd lost hold of the character's real motivation behind their actions, and it all felt like a muddle, like I was just shovelling manure onto the page to get it out of the way. The draft is done, and hopefully I can clean it up, find its purpose and structure more clearly when I transcribe it.
That leaves me One fifth of the way to my goal, and almost halfway through my time. That doesn't look good, I'll admit, but with the rest of my stories not being intended for an anthology, I have a suspicion the reduced pressure will make them much easier to draft. That's my hope, anyway. I have some doubts I can make it to ten, now -- that would be four stories a week -- but I'll make a good crack at it.
Write comment (0 Comments)1500 words this morning, which goes to show that I should try this morning writing lark again more often, even if it does mean getting up when I haven't slept instead of kidding myself I can feel more refreshed with repeated unsuccessful attempts at snoozing. I'm inches away from act 3. I meant to write more this evening, but stress of sudden unrelated stuff that was unfortunately thematically very resonant with what I was writing siphoned off all the words, and there was much tidying and cleaning instead in that self-deluded way where we think if we control everything else tightly enough, some of that control will convey via mystical osmosis to the things that are beyond us. So, that was productive (not), but at least my apartment is tidy.
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