The act of writing can be a form of release – a confession performs the same action: putting your inner life on the page or into the hands of a trusted person releases tensions and sheds light on what often seems hidden until spoken – or written.
— Connie Nielsen
I have a confession to make. I’m back up to level 492 on Solitaire Garden. And the ploy of going to the craft store to replace some of my gaming time with crafting time did not work. *sigh*
And that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that between rounds they show advertisements, and the ads they’ve been showing the most are for Lenovo laptops, the laptop I was lusting after before I got this one.
There’s nothing wrong with the lap top I’m using now. Sure, it gets a little warm when I’m using it on my lap, and it’s heavy and the battery life sucks, but I really like the backlit keyboard with its adjustable colours and it’s smooth to type on . . . But Lenovo has a fingerprint lock, and it’s lighter, and some of them come with a built in fan.
I told the hubby about it, thinking he’d tell me there’s nothing wrong with my old laptop so what’s the point in getting a new one, but he let me down. He said I should go for it. I could use the old lap top for gaming and social media, and the new one strictly for writing. Say what?
So then I told him that if I got a new one I could wipe the old one so he could use it – his lap top was never great to begin with and it seems to be going downhill fast, but he doesn’t want to go to the trouble of switching all of his music programs over to a different computer.
I’ve gone to the Lenovo site a couple of times to check them out – so many choices! – and I’ve narrowed it down to a couple, but I’m still having a hard time justifying it in my mind. Maybe I should just table the whole idea of a separate laptop for writing until I’m actually, you know, writing consistently.
I did get my regular blog post done and my Fiction Friday post done last week, I didn’t start the new non-fiction series yet because I’m waffling between two different series.
Poetry played a big part in my writing last week. I did quite a lot of research for this month’s “poemwork” for my poetry group, which was to “write a mandala poem.” At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea, I mean as prompts go that’s pretty vague, but then I got a few ideas and started doing some research, and then I figured out a really unique way to present it. Then I was sitting out on the deck working on my mandala poem and a whole different poem kinda swooped into my head, so I wrote it down on the back of one of my pages of notes.
I also, be still my heart, generated some interest in the two books I have sitting here waiting to be edited. Elemental Spirit was featured on Fiction Friday, and when I was going over it to find an excerpt I had a brilliant idea of how to re-do the beginning. And I’ve also come to the conclusion I’m going to have to bite the bullet and do journal entries for the beginning of each chapter like I did in Fire and Water.
I’ve been trying to edit Blood Ties on the computer, and I really wasn’t getting anywhere, so I finally printed it out – all 328 pages of it – to work on a few pages at a time. And I also came up with a new idea to begin this one, but I’m going to think about it for a bit before I tackle it.
With Elemental Spirit, it’s in such terrible shape it won’t matter if I take a section from later on and move it to the beginning, But with Blood Ties, it’s pretty much done except for the final polish, and to change the beginning at this point would take a bit a work. Twenty or thirty pages worth of work. I’ll probably do it, it’ll make for a better story, but it won’t make me happy doing it. LOL
I managed to pull myself out of the Nora Roberts black hole with my reading, switching my attention to fairy tales, including some non-fiction books about them. But I didn’t get back to Bird By Bird last week, which means no exercises in the writing journal. I didn’t get around to the three minutes with three words writing prompts either.
The Week Ahead . . .
It’s going to be a busy week this week. I get to do some actual babysitting of the grandbaby, I’ve got to clean up the old couch set for the charity group that’s coming to pick it up, the new set is going to be delivered, and there’s a business meeting with my poetry group. Plus my office is still a mess and I’d really like to fix that. Maybe move some books around.
I want to dive head first into the edits on Blood Ties, even if it means rewriting the first 30 pages or so, and ideally I’d like to start with the rewrites of Elemental Spirit.
And finally, I need to pick a new novel to take with me to the writing retreat I’m going to in the fall. You know, the one I was supposed to go to in the spring of 2020. :-D I was originally going to take Knightsong (the novel I started for NaNo 2010) but it’s nowhere near finished and I’d like something a little closer to being done.
So . . . what will you be writing this week?
No comments:
Post a Comment