Thank God it's Tuesday
May 30, 2000
7:02 a.m.
Sore. Not soar like an eagle. Sore. Sore. Sore. It was a long weekend. Yes. It was a very long weekend with almost no writing, and a lot of work around the house. We moved furniture, and we filled cracks in our basement, and we cut the grass and we weeded and we did mulch and we filled more cracks. We moved more furniture. We vacuumed. I've seen more of the crawl space than I ever intended to see. Sore. We rewarded ourselves with ice cream each day. Sore. In the end, we sat in the basement and pretended to have a conversation about changing the layout and design of our working arrangement. We're a three computer/home-networked clan, and we're consindering becoming at least a 4 computer/home-networked clan, using the forth as a general purpose system and peripheral server. But I think we were too sore to develop much excitement over the concept. Thank God it's Tuesday.   But that's not what you're here for, is it? I picked up the story again this morning. It's about 4,500 words along right now, and I even like the first 3,000 or so. I expect it will round out at about 6,000, meaning I should finish the final first draft tomorrow some time. This is the one, by the way. It's the story that I've been looking for for the past four or six weeks. All total I'll estimate that I wrote 12-15,000 words (maybe more, really) before finding the "right" one. I have friends that just shake their heads at this approach. My very best lunch buddy, for example, is Chuck Eckert--a meticulous writer who keeps everything he puts to paper, figuring it's going to be useful sometime. He doesn't appear to commit anything to paper until he sees the entire thing. I certainly respect that approach and very much admire it--and, in fact, I use it to some extent. I always feel better if I have a big picture view of where the story is going. But I get the details by scattershot. I write a ton of words trying to get the idea generator lubricated, you know? And what I've found is that little pieces of each draft find their way into the final. Little details that make the whole so much more believable--they lead, of course, to internal validation. For example, an earlier draft of this story focused on an event that I pick up and use as a historical occurance in the "final." I would have never been able to do that if I hadn't written the 2,000 words or so I wrote on the earlier attempt. I'm odd, I suppose. But it works for me. And it beats the heck out of mucking around in the crawl space.  Sore Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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