Feeling My Way Around
January 29, 2001
6:31 a.m.
It's a long story, but no, I didn't move the novel forward much this weekend. Yes, I did write another short story. Sue me. Actually, I wrote about 85% of the first draft of a short story this weekend, then essentially finished it off this morning. This one needs quite a bit of filing around the edges, though--or maybe a better analogy is that it needs a little putty to fill the cracks. I rushed a few details in order to get the story down. It's sitting at 7,000 words right now--pretty good output for an afternoon and a morning's work, I suppose. So, it's probably a novelette by the time I'm done. We'll see. I came to the page on Sunday morning with the story idea, and a basic idea of what I wanted to do with it. I wasn't completely sure of the plot. I wasn't totally sure of the character. I did know the feel I wanted and the messages I wanted to put forward. I just wrote from that point on. I doubled back occasionally, and yes, the story changed a little in the telling. But I'm pretty pleased with the result right now (not that I can't mess it up in the next draft, of course). This one was particularly interesting because although I didn't come to the page with structure in mind, I could feel it growing with me as I went. I could sense try fail cycles rising and falling, could feel what the characters were trying to do--or better I could feel when a character wasn't doing something they were supposed to do. This all makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I actually am learning how to work in the field of fiction. Of course, the editors--and, eventually the readers--will have the last word on that one.   I would have finished the draft yesterday, but I watched Baltimore manhandle the Giants in the Super Bowl instead. Yeah, I know. How bad do you really want it, eh? Like the Giants, I spent much of the weekend punting. I decided I had enough of the painfully buggy Netscape 6 browser, so I went back to 4.7, which, for me, entailed spending hours downloading and installing and moving junk around. The bottom line was that their browser was slow and crashy on my machine, and their e-mail client equally so. The final straw was when I couldn't even get the newsreader to read their support newsgroups. Jeeze. I like computers, don't get me wrong. I think they're glorious fun. But I'm getting tired of dealing with all this junk just to make things work. So, I've got my mail reader back. And I've the same old substandard browser going again--and at least I can test stuff locally better than I have in the recently. I'm debating going to the dark side and making IE my main browser, and using Netscape only as my main reader. But, then, I figure this may be getting into more drivel than you wanted to hear. Have a great day.  So, that's like, 3.5 shorts stories since the novel began... Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Anne Lamott |
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