teamzerbert

10:53 am: Write-A-Thon
Finished the Write-A-Thon successfully (barely)! Yay!

I will try to post-mortem the results sometime in the next day or two.

10:52 am: Silly quizzes
Ah, naturally:

Your results:
You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt)

An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 75% Beverly Crusher 70% James T. Kirk (Captain) 60% Spock 52% Data 46% Deanna Troi 45% Jean-Luc Picard 40% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 35% Will Riker 35% Geordi LaForge 25% Mr. Sulu 20% Chekov 15% Uhura 15% Worf 15% Mr. Scott 0%

Since your accomplishments are seldom noticed, and you are rarely thought of, you are expendable. That doesn't mean your job isn't important but if you were in Star Trek you would be killed off in the first episode you appeared in.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

08:48 am: Finished a new one . . .
Finished a new story late on Friday night, all Selkie-like and only 1600 words. I was planning on writing a big chunk of Saturday, but mostly got crits done instead, so I'm whittling away at all those extra words I got in the first couple of weeks.

I'll have to lay down a lot more this week, though. I've got 4 stories started (more than 1500 words each already), and I need to actually finish 2 of those in the next two weeks.

Will it be: The Stigmata Virus (5000 more words-ish, I'd guess); the cyberpunk story (eesh, maybe 7000 words to go - it's definitely novella-sized); the minotaur story (maybe 5000, maybe less), or the witness story (God knows)?

Let's skip the Witness story - that's one where I have a feeling for the character, and I have some words, and I have a "mood" of the piece, but I still don't know where the plot is going at all.

That used to not bother me - I'd just write about a character's adventures until I felt like I'd gotten to the end of the story. Later I'd worry more about structure. And that's more or less what Stephen King suggests in On Writing. (A fabulous book on writing, BTW).

Lately, I've really been wanting to know where a story is going before I invest too much time in it. Since I haven't been writing as much since the baby, I don't know if that's a byproduct of the Write-A-Thon mentality (Must. Finish. Story. This. Week.), or if it's a byproduct of never feeling like I have enough time (baby again), so I don't want to waste time meandering around in a story. Or it could be that my writer-ly approach has somehow been altered.

When the Write-A-Thon is over, I really need to sit down with Witness and see if I can get somewhere on it by just continuing to work with the character and whatever comes up. I'd hate to lose that method of writing, even if it is less efficient.

Now I'm gonna head down to a cafe (leaving my sweet bear with her grandma for the morning. Go, grandmas!)

02:07 pm: Sigh
Took the Bear to the doctor again today. She's teething AGAIN. It wasn't enough for her bottom two teeth to come in three weeks ago, no. Now her top two teeth are coming in, too.

Poor thing, no wonder she's been feverish and cranky (and making me crazy) most of the week. I wonder what it would feel like to have your first four teeth come in, all in one month.

02:07 pm: Update on WAT
Sooo, I managed to complete last week's goal, but only just. Eric's small surprise party was last Sunday, and preparation for it took much longer than expected, given the tiny amount of people invited. It also ran nearly all day. Whew.

I finished the short story "Fear of Flying" (desperately needs a new title) on Friday night. It was a quickie - only about 1800 words. This was the first week I finished a story before I had finished my wordcount. Then on Saturday, I stayed up super-late until I had another 1700 words down on the cyberpunk story (no title yet).

But then I didn't write at all for the last several days (blah, blah, baby sick, cleaning house from party, doing overdue crits for other members of CW '05, blah, blah), so I'm grossly behind this week. Rush, rush, rush.

Got two and a half hours before the babysitter leaves. I gotta burn up the computer keys. :-)

12:41 am: All done!
Well, Shiloh is finished. Week Two is complete a day early, and here are the totals:

Week 2 wordcount: 4586 (goal: 3500)
Week 2 stories completed: 1 (goal: 1)

Write-A-Thon wordcount: 12270
Write-A-Thon stories completed: 2

Woo Hoo!

03:52 pm: Almost there. Wait, when did this story get boring?
Number of Words written this week: 3341

Almost to the 3500 word goal, and it's still Saturday. I'd like to get this story (Shiloh) finished tonight, after Eric and the baby are in bed, and then I can be on a Sunday-to-Saturday schedule, instead of the Monday-to-Sunday schedule that I started with.

Sadly, all that research I did has really bogged the story down. Instead of being a fast-reading horror bit, it's a slogging mess (not unlike the Civil War itself). After it's really done, it's going to have to be pared way down, and I'm going to have to lose a lot of authenticity (about boring stuff like troop movements, et cetera), or it'll be unreadable.

12:51 pm: Oh, right
And yesterday, my lovely husband Eric pointed out this gem from Poul Anderson's "Seven Conquests." This occurs during the middle of a fight with a Tyrannosaurus Rex:

"The monster standing there, swaying a little, roaring and bleeding, was not entirely real. This had happened a hundred million years ago. Rain struck the hot gun barrel and sizzled off."

*Sigh*

12:30 pm: Flag Amendment
Flag amendment? Flag amendment?! Does this come up EVERY election cycle, or what?! I'm serious, I think this has come up every two years for, like, the LAST FRIGGING DECADE!!!

Actually, I just checked the good old Intar-web, and it says the House has passed the amendment EVERY year for the past six years. It's only been defeated in the Senate. This year, it was defeated by only one vote.

James Madison, one of the people who designed our Constitution, said that it should be amended only on "great and extraordinary occasions." Yeah, and SUGGESTIONS for amending it should be made EVERY FRIGGING YEAR. Especially the same suggestion, over and over again. Right in between Flag Day and the Fourth of July.

Ech. Our tax dollars at work.

Baby sleeping. Must take advantage of writing time. Must remember: Blogging does not affect word count.

08:20 pm: Quiet Day
Quiet day on the writing front. Re-wrote the 270 words that I'd lost and added another 225 to "Shiloh."

In other news, sold a bunch of books at a used bookstore in the U-District and blew $20 in credit on a signed Ray Bradbury book. I never had any sense. But it's RAY BRADBURY!

Words for the day: 495
Words for the week: 495
Words for the Write-A-Thon: 8179 (sheesh!)
Stories completed: 1