Tag: free-writing

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Authoring Teacup Posts Whimsy Writing Life

October Word 2

The month’s 2nd random act of typing (See previous post for explanation)

October 2. Doorman

Door. Man. Well, now, that does bring a picture to mind. Brass buttons on a long, red coat, funny hat, gloves, standing guard at the portal to some obscenely expensive building where people would look at me funny for Not Belonging. Or wait. No. A door man could also be a man made out of a door. A two-sided kind of a person. Or it could be a person you have to go through to get where  you want to go…which, basically ANY man in a woman’s life. Now I’m thinking of those game where some guy is standing in the middle of wherever, with a light shining down, and you have to interact with them to get something. They’re all doormen.

Stay tuned or tune out, there will be more.

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Teacup Posts Writing Life

October words: I want to draw, but all I have are letters.

I guess I could call it Wordtober. The House Migration Adventure is winding down, but getting re-settled into my creative brainspace is a challenge. The idea of quick daily sketches to warm up the creative juices has a powerful appeal…but I don’t draw.  And experience has proven (alas) that most writing exercises either bore me to distraction,  or they bog me down and exhaust my limited concentration reserves.

Word sketches, though–those work for me. So. Every day this October, I’m doing 3-minute free-writing sessions on randomly generated words.  I’ve done several already (and I am unreasonably proud of keeping up the discipline 3 whole days in a row…)  but I was too busy/exhausted/unmotivated to format & tag a draft this post and get them posted until now.

Here’s the month’s first random act of typing

October 1. Obscurity.

Hoo, boy. That’s a word to drag a shiver of fear across any creative’s skin. Under the skin. Obscured, in the dark, unknown, lost and unseen.  Hidden, secrets, nothing but secrets and being forgotten and being overlooked. I keep coming back to being unSEEn, but what about unheard? That’s a kind of obscurity too. Erasure, even. Like words I can’t quite remember, or a song on the tip of my tongue that isn’t there any more. Lost to obscuriy, hidden behind the debris of everyday life. Buried. Dead and gone and no one even notices. That’s obscurity. Ugh.

Stay tuned or tune out, there will be more.

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Whimsy Writing Life

Winter checklist 4

1. I got out of bed. I’m honestly proud of that. The way I felt when I woke up, I really, really, REALLY wanted to pull up the covers, burrow under the pillows, and hide in bed all day. Instead, I got up and did some things. Slowly. Stiffly. Painfully. In a haze.

But I got up. Yay.

2. I made more words in Ghost Town. Not as many as I would’ve liked, but lots more than I expected given how slow my brain and body were moving.

3. Got my revision ideas for Sharp Edge all organized & answered some emails.

5. Went to a library meeting and didn’t feel entirely useless. Mostly, but not entirely.

6. Organized a bunch of DVDs (Part of the larger ‘putting DVD into binders’ project) I’m so comfortable with the breakdown structure of alphabetizing it’s now a soothing, meditative activity. Reminded me of the best workdays at Borders.

7. Did searches on dyspraxia, ADHD, epoxy resin chemistry, eagles of Asia, and sage propagation. Because internet.

8. Reworked yet another page of the brain-bending present-tense short story. Only a few pages left now.

9. Did some reading and jotted notes for reviews. I love the idea floating on Twitter right now of doing 30 reviews in a month, but I don’t read that fast, and don’t have a backlog of already-read-books I want to review.  I keep forgetting to mention it anywhere, but I do post a fair number of reviews. I dunno why putting “I REVIEWED THIS” on social media feels like bragging, but it does. I mean, I say I liked things here on the blog and so forth, but I don’t specifically mention that I also said I liked the thing on its selling site.  ANYway. Enough about that.

10. And I wrote down my doings here. It’s always meta fun to put the list as an item on the list.

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Whimsy Writing Life

Third Winter checklist

1. Put some pondering time into a tagline for Rough Passages. Current front-runner: “Super-powered grandmothers, elemental Marines, and extraordinary teens.”

2. Added loads of 2019 commitments to the Master Calendar so I don’t forget them.

3. Sent in days-off requests for my  recovery days for my confirmed conventions. (Concoction, WisCon, GenCon & Dragon Con)

4. Finished a scene in Ghost Town WIP. Yes. I wrote.  How many words? MANY.

5. added accountability tasks to my Habitica dashboard for Sharp Edge revisions. because I’ll be starting that soon <cue flailing>

6. Did NOT take ibuprofen in the middle of the day. First time in a week. That counts as an accomplishment. With any luck I will be able to stop consciously thinking about chewing every time I eat by next Monday.

7. Did research on cheap, quiet treadmills. Because I am a dreamer and hope to have both a bit of floor available in the basement and the $$$ to cough up for equipment.

8. Reworked another page of the short story. Bending verb tenses makes my brain hurt.

9. Decanted some movies from their cases & organized them. A very zen way to spend evening time after my brain turned to mush after work.

All that, and a walk, but I also feel like it was NOT ENOUGH. Bah.

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Whimsy Writing Life

2nd winter checklist

Today I’m featuring things I did yesterday, because sitting back down to the ‘puter after supper was one of the things I did not do. That’s a thing on my habits to-form list, one that’s a struggle to achieve on nights I work.

Anyway.

1. Commissioned a new cover for my holiday-ish novella Joining In the Round (THANK YOU RACHEL BOSTWICK) It’s going to be so much prettier and match Turning the Work much better.

1.5 (because it’s also an authoring thing)  Applied for an online ad in case I want to do a holiday promo for Rough Passages.

2. Remembered to water the plants.

2.5 Realized I now regularly sit in a chair I never used to use. A chair I recently moved it next to the plant stand. A chair near the grow lights. Evidently I am a plant.

3. Worked on the present-tense revisions to my short story so I can submit it before year’s end. (the one that could expand into a novella someday if I’m not careful)

4. Sorted out the DVD collection so they can go into binders instead of taking up a wall of shelves. See, binders can go next to the TV so I can browse movies there instead of surfing channels. Then I can watch more things without commercials when I need a sensory distraction to help my creative focus.

5. Made microscopic progress on the section of the Ghost Town WIP (work in progress) that I have to finish before I ‘m allowed to dive into revisions on Sharp Edge.