Stagnant, but alive!

One more time, that pesky real life thinger gets in the way. :P I've gotten engaged, for one thing (and if I'd stop mucking around the internet and write something half-decent, it might help to pay for the wedding, but what can you do?)... and the move has been shuffled around a couple of times.

Beyond a recent interest in contemporary fiction (chick lit flavor)*, not much has been going on.

* You may have noticed that that sort of fluff is just about the furthest one can get from my personal style... but when your teddy bear speaks to you, there's nothing to be done but listen and obey. By the way, I'll love the guy who added the crack to Ambien until the day I die, and yes, officer, you may see my prescription slip.

I manage to find these little pockets of inactivity from time to time, but I always miss it until I make it around again. It comes out in funny ways... I don't sleep as well (even with the Ambien), seams stop coming up flush, I get a little bitey (imagine that). When I'm writing, and even when I'm writing badly, the edges smooth out on their own. I guess it's cheaper than crack.

Oh, fantastic.

There I was, trucking along quite well- going back over a previous scene and tweaking, as I always do before settling into the "real" work for the night (fresh progress)... and POW! Blue screen of death. Thanks very much, Geraldine. Lucky if I don't turn you in for an old-fashioned typewriter.

So! I guess Writer4 doesn't actually have a streamlined auto-save option (or I haven't found it yet). There seems to be a setting for saving at set intervals, but it creates a new backup file each time... figure doing that every three minutes for an hour plus each night.

Color me ass-pained.

Whoohoo!

I finally made some real progress with a scene I've been struggling with quite a bit! It's a few sentences from being complete, but they are still milling around upstairs and have no interest in coming down for a nip or a chomp at 1AM. And it really begs a strong close, so I'll let it sit.

I should appreciate these hurdles, but there are times when I've flailed against them for a while and damnit, I just run out of creative ways to curse the text pointer. ;) Nights like these I'd prefer to cut, print, and kill the pig... or the extraneous character, in this case, with apologies to Krusty.

I've been flopping around on AW a little the past few days, critting here and there... I don't write well when my back is stiff. Whining we got. Productivity? Not so much. But critiquing/editing is another part of the craft that I really enjoy. It cheers me up every time, and not just because I'm inherently evil. (But it helps.)

There is something really refreshing about cutting out the brown spots of a story. Especially a really good one- there are always some gems available on AW, although some other forums leave me wanting to drop the red pen and go for the writer's squishy bits. It's not always flawed writing that brings up my foam... more often than not it's writers who don't really believe that their writing is anything less than something exquisite to be savored- when in reality I was clawing the residue off my tongue five pages ago. Worse, the effort that goes into a dedicated crit... the consideration, thought, and time that I would have spent on my WIP otherwise is not well appreciated by that sort. For four paragraphs of assistance I get a bland, "Thanks. Now what about THIS..."

Should have just given 'em the tongue goop bit, yeah?

Too... many... projects!

I've been in and out of town for the past several days... juggling family functions and other events. There's been a bit of a lapse in the old blog. Not to worry! I'm incapable of shutting my yap for any length of time. ;)

I'm having trouble with focus right now... part of the problem is that there are so many projects waiting to be seen to. They are from a couple of different genres and are, at the moment, jostling for position and causing a lack of dedication to my current WIP.

There is a lonely CRIME-related project:

* Current WIP (psychothriller)

We have the horror-slanted:

* Demonic schoolhouse story (this one's at full volume)
* Zombiemutant story (which has as many holes as steady points)

And the horse-related YA:

* GTKJ (the one with the miniature donkey)
* Sneaky rehab (involving sisters and an injury)

I know there are others, but they've slipped my mind. Good!

No, I don't give them working titles... it encourages the little bastards.

A short rant and an incidental review.

Tonight, as I trolled the Stephen King forums, I saw a post lamenting SK's one-liner on Richard Laymon's The Woods Are Dark. The timing was interesting because I just read that particular book last week. It took me about forty-five minutes. I could not put it down.

The posters in this particular thread hated the book for the most part... not surprising if you've read it. It's an easy book to hate. No, the surprising part came towards the end of the thread... where a poster said, "After reading (the OP)'s take on Richard Laymon, I have no desire to read his books."

Did you try to read some sarcasm into that? You did, didn't you!? I certainly did. My mind rejects the thought that a person might actually dismiss not just a single title but every book the author put out in his lifetime... based on the opinion of one person on the internet...

(Cue creaking noises from the old gray matter.)

Now, if my mom told me not to- wait, no, that won't work, my mom hates horror... if my hypothetical horror-loving mother pooh-poohed a book, I might not bother with it. On the other hand, I might rush out and buy a copy purely because I might want to see the train wreck with my own eyes. And that's my mom.

It's one thing to stay away from a book or author because they aren't really your style... but when your style is clearly horror (King: master of), to cross an author off of your list because someone else didn't like one of his books? It has to have something going for it, doesn't it? It got a review from SK, didn't it? You don't have a review from SK, do you?

I did not hate The Woods Are Dark... it isn't a startlingly in-depth masterpiece, no. It's a sick, twisted, dark and capering little thing. Within the first couple of chapters, it had set rusty hooks into me. Parts of it disgusted, astonished and amazed me by turn. I immediately sent it off with my boyfriend to read. It is the quintessential train wreck, complete with corpses hanging from the windows and survivors screwing in the aisles, still waiting for the final hammer to fall. "Surprise, DEATH! Aaand... move on."

On another note, I finally made a little headway with the WIP... not as much as I would have liked, but I'm pleased with the quality (for now).

Grinding to a halt...

I haven't gotten much done lately. It seems like there's been a lot going on... and you know what that means; there hasn't been. I suppose it's a good problem to have, this thinking too much versus thinking too little.

My mind is flopping around with the rubbery consistency of over-cooked eggs. Excitable over-cooked eggs. We're beginning to need a traffic light up there. See? I got nothin'.

I did get a chance to run a few details by a psychologist today, though! He thinks that the psychological aspect will add to my readership quite a bit when/if I get to that point. He's about to start a book himself, it turns out.

Hard-to-write scenes.

I struggled today with the first of many hard-to-write scenes in this WIP. In this case I was trying to portray a child's utter terror at swimming slowly out of a drugged haze, and following his thoughts beginning with having no reason to believe that he isn't in his bed through to realizing that he is (alone?) in a strange, dark place... tied to a cheap chair.

There is some fun pant-wetting and a daddy issue that surfaces nearly the first thing... I love the scene for what it is, but it's a hard thing to write. Not only due to the gravity of the scene- who wants to fluff off something this serious and tragic?- but also to the squick factor. No one likes to see children face mortal terror. Unfortunately it's crucial to the progression of the story.

I am not a child-eater myself. Even my zombies prefer lean meat to fatty children. Can't have a fat zombie, can't runshamble fast enough.

The AlphaSmart 2000 is working beautifully. I'm in love! I discovered pretty early on (thank goodness) that removing the batteries dumps the work... oops. I only lost a little ground. I'd thought that removing the batteries between breaks would keep co-workers out of it. I suppose I'll have to get a lock. I also picked up a PS2 cord for it at Walmart for $15, so I did much better than the ~$20 +shipping that I would have paid on eBay.

Aah! So excited!

My AlphaSmart 2000 has arrived!

It's an older model (I assume, as it does not actually have a model- not the Neo or Dana) 2000... but I'm already in love with it. The screen is bright and clear, and there is no lag time between keys being stuck and words hitting the screen. It's also extremely lightweight. It has a couple of sticky places where tape has been pulled off, but those will come off... and oddly enough, a large gold and black "H" sticker on the back.

As such, I shall call him Horace.

The missing character bios have been partially regurgitated... it isn't as enjoyable the second time around. I'm changing a few things, tweaking character ages here and there. My old people were too young. I realized that the older woman I'd cast as my villain's wife was around my mother's age, which was not old enough... so she (and her husband) are ten years older now and more true to themselves.

I've also added a couple of goldfish as minor characters.

On the need for backups...

I just lost all of the in-depth character profiles I'd done to date. Thanks, laptop. You're a gem.

Right after that happened, though, I saw a thread on AW about tools of writing... and someone mentioned having gotten an AlphaSmart 2000. I hadn't heard of them, and when I checked them out on eBay I found one used for $20. I have made it mine. Most of the writing that I do at work is longhand... which can be problematic if my hands are playing up that day. Laptops are forbidden at my workplace, but this should be allowed... it doesn't have enough memory to store massive blocks of text, but I can dump the work onto my PC/into yWriter4 each night.

Procrastination.

It feels like I spent all day thinking about the WIP... but without really coming to any new conclusions or writing anything down. Frustrating.

In other news, if you see movement over this way in the morning, it's safe to assume Ranch's refrigerate after opening note is a friendly suggestion rather than a rule.