Nightowl strikes again
Been a weird day. I haven’t been getting great sleep this week, so I went to bed early last night. My brain wouldn’t shut down, though.
See, this short story I’ve been trying to write for the past couple of weeks has been bothering me. It just wasn’t working. I had written about a page of it – 600 words, maybe – and it ground to a stop on me. After leaving it alone for a few days, apart from random ponderings when I wasn’t writing on the train, I realised what the problem was. The main character just didn’t feel right. She’s an amalgamation of a couple of characters I have played around with for years, but her pieces just didn’t fit together right (which is ironic, considering the central issue of the story – it’s all about her and her pieces, but unfortunately not in this way). I think I was trying to do a bit too much with her.
So I jiggled her around a bit. Took out one of those two old characters, melded her into something a bit different (so that she isn’t batshit crazy like the other chickie she’s based on), and came out with something that should work better now. Fingers crossed.
I’ve been meaning to get back to writing this story for days, but Sunday was a bust (thank you, CFS) and AB takes up my writing time during the week. Last night, in the vain attempts to lull my brain into drifting so I could go to sleep, I kept getting snatches of scenery for this story. I both love and hate it when that happens.
I gave up on sleeping and grabbed my little netbook, and wrote for an hour. One of the other things that was wrong with my first pass at the story was that I had glossed over one of the most important parts of the character’s tale. So I went back and reworked that, and it’s now sitting at about 1200 words. Unfinished (it looks like it’s going to turn out to be about 4,000 words), but it’s getting there.
The best part is that I went to sleep fairly quickly after that.
I’ve always been good at night-writing. Words seem to come easily then, but my health and schedule won’t really allow for it. It’s a frustrating conundrum.
Perhaps I should try to work in an hour of writing before I sleep every night. The problem with that is that sometimes I’m too tired to be creative – it’s a delicate balance between enervated wordsmithing and exhaustion-driven drivel. Hmm. Maybe I’ll just make a point of making myself write something if I am too brain-busy to sleep. If it’s crap, I can always delete it in the morning.
I’ve been doing more reviews of creative work lately, too. Been getting back into the critique board on the Accentuate Writers Forum, and that’s been fun, actually. I like to keep my hand in, but I’m not sure how much I can keep that up. I generally use it as a break when I should be doing something else, so my presence there is pretty erratic.
I do keep kicking myself about the Writing Tips things, too. I am even getting a list of ideas for it! Must get started on the dialogue stuff soon. I’d like to aim for one post a fortnight, but I’ll see how I go.
I have put out feelers about the guest posting on AB, too. I need to work out the details of that and how it’s going to work. I just realised that I’ll have to work out a statement about publishing rights for it. Oh, joy. Shouldn’t be too hard, though.
How did my list get so long? Ahhh. I need to start writing this stuff down somewhere (other than buried in these blogposts), if only so I can cross stuff off. Possibly with a little dance.
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