Wittering

So, today I mostly stared at the second episode of my Mysterious Serial Project. Happily, it's at six thousand words (close to half of the 15,000 minimum) although I got stumped and spent most of the day staring at it.

This was not helped by Carrie's repeated mention of what music she was listening to, which is just exactly the sort of thing which leads an author like me -- with the attention span of a small spastic bird -- into hunting through his CD cases looking for Weird Al's "Dare to be Stupid" album, or trying to remember which KISS Alive album I owned.*

I already knew how the scene was supposed to go. Around three in the afternoon, I suddenly realized that the reason the scene wasn't writing itself was, I was trying to write a character as I wanted him to act, which has nothing to do with how he's begun to act. With my happy breakthrough in mind I--

--discovered that my wife got off work early, and thus I got no writing done. Until now. Or after this blog post anyway.

...

David Eddings burned down his office while cleaning gasoline out of an old car in an effort to prevent a fire. It's funny, in a way, but I feel bad for him.


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Being off of the AbsoluteWrite forums has increased my productivity a great deal. On good days, when characters aren't puzzling me, I'm averaging five thousand words on all sorts of projects. I'm getting e-mails off to the Serial artist on time, I even had time to finish changes to the BBT Web-site. It's very good and useful, even if it's less fun. I enjoy the AW forums a great deal (we're a big dysfunctional family, in that we mostly love and/or hate each other and want to die) but I'm very self conscious of how much time it gobbles up, and how all that time comes out of my writing hours. Am unsure what to do about it.

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TODAY'S FUN FACT: The lead singer for...whatever band is was which recorded "Inna Gadda Divida" was, in fact, so drunk on the day he recorded vocals for it that he slurred the words "In The Garden of Eden" which, in gibberish form, is what we now call the song "inna Gadda Divida." Now you know.

What I'm Reading:
-- War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull - Not the first time I've read it, and certainly not the last. She makes it look so damn easy. It's such a fun book to read. There are no dull bits where you think "Time to go to bed." This is not necessarily a good thing.

-- Seize The Fire, by Adam Nicolson - A book about the Battle of Trafalgar and Lord Nelson, cleanly and sharply written and very enjoyable for anyone who enjoys naval battles, history, or just an interesting story that happens to be true. It's neither fiction nor fictionalized, but is still a smart and interesting book.


* The KISS Album I owned, as it turned out, was KISS Alive III, which is a good CD. This huge and momentary victory ended in tragedy, however, when I discovered the CD by stepping on it and cracking it badly enough to render it useless. All was not lost, however, in that I discovered KISS's "Psycho Circus" album this same way, and it is unbroken.