Forgive me father, for I have sinned
Jul. 13th, 2009 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuIt has been a week since my last confess--uh, post. The overview is that I've let stress and worry get inside my head and muck up my thinking. Specifically, in that time I have:
1. Forgotten something that I had known earlier. Specifically, that I will often think my current work in progress sucks. I must continue on nonetheless, finishing it. I haven't written a lot this past couple of weeks because I've been struggling to find a way to write the story that Doesn't Suck (tm). I'm hunting a snipe. So I've gotten back on the horse today.
2. Succumbed to the fear that I don't know what I'm doing. Which is, in some ways, true enough. If I for sure knew what I need to know, I'd be selling stories by now. I'm still learning. Which means, pretty much by definition, that I don't know everything I need to know. That doesn't mean I don't know something, or that I can't learn more. And I learn more by studying, yes, but mostly by the Carnegie Hall route. Practice, practice, practice.
3. Paid too much attention to "how to" instruction. I was writing, completing and mailing stories for the last couple of months. In the last two weeks I've completed and mailed bupkis. Nada. Zip. Zilch. So I need to get back to what works. And, again, I've done that today.
4. Doing the editors' jobs for them. The current story, "Bound by Convention" is a sequel of sorts to another story I've written. It stands on its own; you needn't have read the first story to follow this one. Nonetheless, given that the first story hasn't sold, my inner editor keeps nagging at me that I can't write this one, or shouldn't; or, having written it, can't sell it, or shouldn't. That's not my decision. That's an editor's decision. I forgot that. Time to bind and gag my inner editor and bury him in a deep, dark hole in a corner of my psyche.
5. Have not been specific enough about my goals. Not on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis.
My words written total for today is undoubtedly low. I've been stitching together "Bound by Convention" like Frankenstein's monster, from bits and pieces of scenes. Nothing wrong with that--and it IS coming together nicely. But it means that I'm deleting at least as much as I'm adding as I carve away all the parts that don't look like a story.
In good news, however, my word total is rapidly approaching 90,000--the minimum for a novel. That's a novel's worth of words in about two and a half months. Nothing like a novel has emerged, true, but the sheer production of text is clearly well within my capabilities.
Words Written Today: 1,149
Words Written YTD (since May 1): 82,526
Stores in Circulation: 8
Rejections: 4
Stories Accepted: TBD
1. Forgotten something that I had known earlier. Specifically, that I will often think my current work in progress sucks. I must continue on nonetheless, finishing it. I haven't written a lot this past couple of weeks because I've been struggling to find a way to write the story that Doesn't Suck (tm). I'm hunting a snipe. So I've gotten back on the horse today.
2. Succumbed to the fear that I don't know what I'm doing. Which is, in some ways, true enough. If I for sure knew what I need to know, I'd be selling stories by now. I'm still learning. Which means, pretty much by definition, that I don't know everything I need to know. That doesn't mean I don't know something, or that I can't learn more. And I learn more by studying, yes, but mostly by the Carnegie Hall route. Practice, practice, practice.
3. Paid too much attention to "how to" instruction. I was writing, completing and mailing stories for the last couple of months. In the last two weeks I've completed and mailed bupkis. Nada. Zip. Zilch. So I need to get back to what works. And, again, I've done that today.
4. Doing the editors' jobs for them. The current story, "Bound by Convention" is a sequel of sorts to another story I've written. It stands on its own; you needn't have read the first story to follow this one. Nonetheless, given that the first story hasn't sold, my inner editor keeps nagging at me that I can't write this one, or shouldn't; or, having written it, can't sell it, or shouldn't. That's not my decision. That's an editor's decision. I forgot that. Time to bind and gag my inner editor and bury him in a deep, dark hole in a corner of my psyche.
5. Have not been specific enough about my goals. Not on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis.
My words written total for today is undoubtedly low. I've been stitching together "Bound by Convention" like Frankenstein's monster, from bits and pieces of scenes. Nothing wrong with that--and it IS coming together nicely. But it means that I'm deleting at least as much as I'm adding as I carve away all the parts that don't look like a story.
In good news, however, my word total is rapidly approaching 90,000--the minimum for a novel. That's a novel's worth of words in about two and a half months. Nothing like a novel has emerged, true, but the sheer production of text is clearly well within my capabilities.
Words Written Today: 1,149
Words Written YTD (since May 1): 82,526
Stores in Circulation: 8
Rejections: 4
Stories Accepted: TBD
