Tuesday, May 13, 2014

I Lied

You know in my last post where I said it was getting better? Well I lied. Big time. :-)

I lost another day to sickness last week, but most of the time I was just busy. Now that the nicer weather's arrived, this will happen more often I'm sure. Which is why, theoretically, I'm supposed to get all my writing done during the week. Which, of course, didn't happen last week.

And I'm off coffee at least temporarily. Normally when I hit the afternoon slump during the week I'd have a half a pot of coffee to boost my creativity. I don't know if that's really what was happening or it was just a psychosomatic thing, but it worked for me. And now I'm finding that after lunch when my energy takes a nose dive, it takes my creativity with it.

So. I need to find a new way of boosting my creativity/energy in the afternoons. Any suggestions? And please do not insult my intelligence by telling me I just need to get some more exercise. Been there, done that. If I exercise in the afternoon then that just leads to napping. Seriously! I get more tired than doing nothing at all.

My Thursday lunch date and I - okay, so last week it was Wednesday, but normally it's Thursday - did the "take our notebooks to lunch" thing again, and this time I got a little more done than last time. So it's progress, anyway. I'm working on a kind of Halloween themed, scary story, and I think I need to print it out again before I can continue. It's getting kind of hard to see the typing under all the hand written notes. :-)

I did not get a new installment for Earth written last week, so I foolishly promised to get two done this week. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then I thought I'd get some writing in over the weekend. I didn't, and it's time to pay the piper. So the first installment went up today, and the second one will be up on its normal day.

WORDAGE REPORT

BLOG POSTS (not counting this one)
The actual total isn't a lot less than last week, but I did fewer of them and the total word count wouldn't be as high if I hadn't been so verbose in Monday's Post

Total: 2666 words

EDITING
Time spent editing last week was zero. :-)

NEW IDEAS
I have no new ideas to report.

POETRY
I did warn you. Poetry is fine when it comes spontaneously, but I'm not going to try and force it.

words = 0

NEW WORDS

An Elemental Earth -947
Lucky Dog - 0
Forever and For Always - 0

Total New Words - 947

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

It's Getting Better

Just as I was finally getting my writing mojo back, I got sick. Dag nabbit! I got a few words done on Lucky Dog on Friday, but ran out of time. Oh, well. There's always the weekend, right? Wrong. I was so sick on the weekend I couldn't even read, let alone write.

Even though my overall wordage was down last week, I still think things are getting better because I'm venturing beyond just blog posts and my serial. Although I didn't get as much done on Lucky Dog as I would have liked, I did do something, and that included deleting 87 words.

I also did a bunch of poetry, which totally took me by surprise. I was transferring notes that I had scatter through various notebooks and scraps of paper into a single book for writing stuff and a separate one for poetry, and found some notes about some poems I'd intended on writing, so I sat down and wrote them.

Thursday I went to lunch with a writing buddy and we took our notebooks (the paper kind, not the electronic kind) with us. The idea was to try and get some writing done in long hand. Well, it worked for her, but I spent more time staring off into space than anything else. And of course just when I finally got working on my story, it was time for lunch. I never did get back to that story, but it's been in my mind ever since.

I actually enjoy writing long hand. After all, that's how I got started writing in the first place. I write my journal in long hand, and my poetry (although I type my poems on the computer when I'm done). And pen and paper are so much easier (and lighter) than a lap top if you want to write somewhere other than the comfort of your own home. I say pen, but actually I use pencil when I'm composing (usually). So I'll probably try writing in a notebook again, maybe somewhere a little quieter. And we'll see what happens.

WORDAGE REPORT

BLOG POSTS (not counting this one) Now here's something interesting. I did three posts over on this blog last week, and yet my overall total for Blog Posts is 200 words less. Go figure. Guess I just didn't have as much to say. But I guarantee next week's totals will be higher - I have a lot to say on tomorrow's Wildcard post, and I've doing a bunch of reading lately so the Friday post should be wordier too.

Total:
2751 words

EDITING

Time spent editing last week was zero. :-)

NEW IDEAS

See? I shouldn't have complained last week. I have no new ideas to report.

POETRY
For a new category, this one sure has been seeing lots of action lately. But like I said in yesterday's post, don't expect to see this on a regular basis. Poetry is fine when it comes spontaneously, but I'm not going to try and force it.

517 words

NEW WORDS
Last week's installment of Earth was a real struggle, so it was shorter by about 200 words. I don't know why this story is giving me such hissy fits. It's not like it's my first serial. But things just aren't progressing the way I've envisioned - some things are going faster, some slower. And some in the wrong order. *sigh* And with Lucky Dog, the spirit is willing but the hands want to skip ahead to the good stuff. Not that it's not all good stuff, but there's a couple of events that happen near the end and I want to skip ahead to them. But skipping is very, very bad and leads to plot holes and such.

An Elemental Earth - 979
Lucky Dog - 198
Forever and For Always - 0

Total New Words - 1177

Monday, May 5, 2014

Pour It Forth

So apparently that little poem I wrote a week ago was like turning on a spigot. Today I sat down and wrote five of them! Now granted, a couple of them were works in progress, but still. That's a pretty good haul considering the creative slump I've been in lately.

I'm only going to share two of them today 'cause they all turned out a little on the depressing side, but sometimes that's just the way the words come out. And don't expect me to be posting a poem every week. Been there, done that, and what it does is turns the poetry into a chore. It went from something I enjoyed, to something I struggled with, to something I loathed. And that was probably a good part of the reason I've been absent from poetry so long. So like everything else on this blog, expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to posting. :-)



Black and Silver

I used to have a silver pen
to use to write in a book
a black book
a journal book
a journey book
the journey of a small part
of my life
of my thoughts
of my dreams . . .
the sense of living
of having lived.
In this book I wrote:
"A moment in time
caught like a fly in amber."
The rest of the pages are black
the rest of the pages are blank
and I wonder
whatever happened to that pen?
whatever happened to my life?

C.R. Ward 05/05/2014


Judgement

You do not know me
and yet you judge me
you form your opinion
without knowing the facts.

I'm the woman in the corner
sipping her latte
wearing long sleeves
to hide her shattered dreams.

I'm the man whose hand trembles
ever so slightly
as he reaches for his coffee
wishing it was something else.

I'm the life of the party
everyone's darling
hiding the emptiness
behind a cheerful facade.

I'm the girl in the corner
alone with her book
the words her armour
to keep the world at bay.

I'm the fat girl in high school
I'm the boy with the acne
I'm the man with the ragged coat
I'm the woman with scars.

I'm the blind man with the tin cup
I'm the woman sleeping in the alley
I'm the kid on the skateboard
I'm man playing sax in the subway.

I speak and my words fly away
you listen, but you do not hear.
You do not know me
yet you judge me
still.

C.R. Ward 05/05/2014

Friday, May 2, 2014

Progress Report

Top 'o the month to you! It's time to update the progress bars. Okay, so it's actually the second day of the month, but close enough, right?

So . . . it looks like the book that saw the most action in the month of April was An Elemental Earth, going from 14477 words to 18261 words. On the one hand this makes sense 'cause I'm serializing it, so that means I'm adding a couple of pages to it each week. But on the other hand, it's a sad testament to the amount I've been writing lately because there's seven days in a week and usually only one of them is needed for Earth.

I don't know why this story seems to be giving me a hissy fit. I go from thinking the story's going too fast to it's dragging too slowly, all in the space of a single scene. Granted some of the things that are supposed to happen happened sooner than expected, like . . . Zephryn finding out that Chloe hasn't undergone her tespiro, and him telling her about it . . . and that makes me think the whole thing is going too fast, but there's lots of stuff that needs to happen yet, and most of it will take a few chapters to develop.

Now, if I can just make up my mind about the climactic scene . . .

It was nice to see some progress on Lucky Dog finally. Okay, so it was only 824 words, but it's still progress! But what's not reflected on the progress bar is the notes I've made for it. While poor Jessica is on her way back to Ghren thanks to the witchguard, Sebastian and his old friend (and Jessica's new one) Dominick are hurrying to her rescue. Meanwhile, I've figured out a couple of major scenes towards the end. AND I came up with a plausible explanation for Howard's disappearance at the end of the next book, Wandering Wizards, and why Sebastian parts company with them temporarily at the end of this one.

I really, really want to get past Jessica's rescue and what happens to Dominic and then her confrontation with Ewan again. But I refuse to skip ahead in the writing. Been there, done that, and it's never a pretty sight. So I'm just going to have to use it as my incentive to get writing. :-)