The word of the week is chapter.
July 2 - Novel progress
It's a new month and a new focus for me: my novel,
naturally. The clock is ticking and I have all the pieces in place, now I have
to assemble it into a working whole. With tons of backstory, a visual guide and
a four-page synopsis, I am all set to turn everything into a series of
linked chapters that will become the novel itself. I'm aiming to get as MANY
chapters as I can done in the next 30-60 days, as I feel I should strike while
the iron's hot, so to speak. Focusing ONLY on the writing will ensure that I
get as close as possible to the core of the story and set it out in sequence as
I see it in my head. Once I have most of a rough draft in place, I can finish
it up this fall and then start the revision process.
By then, I'll most likely have run out of TIME to write, as
I'll have been forced to find a day job. But I'll happily work during the day
knowing that I can spend my evenings revising my novel, making it the best
piece of work I can without obsessing over it. I hope that 2013 will see my
novel make it out into the world in one form or another… but that's a subject
for WELL after the first draft's completed.
July 3 - WE FOUND IT ???
I like science, moreso than most people think, despite my
lack of skill beyond the simplest of mathematics. I used to collect Popular
Science magazines years before the internet made pursuing science news much
more interesting and efficient, though I know that PopSci barely scratched the
surface of many discoveries. From my earliest days of reading, science fiction
has been right at the top of my reading lists, so when today's news about the
Higgs Boson leaked, I was quite excited - another of the building blocks of our
universe may have been found! Well past midnight, I was hanging on the news
from several sites… until the one chestnut showed up stating that the press
conference had 'reduced' the news to 'just' 175 slides. At that point, I gave
up and went to bed, to find THIS animated gem in the morning that neatly
explained how important the Higgs Boson is to our understanding of Everything:
July 4 - Weird Waking Dream!!!
Whoa! I was bounced out of bed( mentally )by the kids above
today, so I walked over to A&W at the Bay Center to calm myself with a
coupon-cheap breakfast; ahhh, the taste of savings. I was still tired, so later
in the day as I was up in the SkyLounge reading Stephen King's ON WRITING, I
decided to take a nap.
Boy, did THAT take an unexpected turn!
I dreamt a waking dream, that I was napping on the couch,
there in the SkyLounge in the sunshine. Everything LOOKED like it should:
bright and sunlit and retro-60's grandparent furniture… AND I COULDN'T WAKE UP!
Every time I swung my feet to the left to 'get up' off the couch, they reset,
like one of those many time-loop scenes in movies where people repeat their
actions. It was unbelievable - I vividly recall trying DOZENS of times to GET
OFF THAT COUCH. I WANTED to wake up, to stand up and go downstairs and make
some tea. I just couldn't do it. Maybe I was too tired( 5.5 hrs sleep )and my
subconscious wouldn't let go easily, I'm not sure. Eventually my internal timer
went off and I woke in time( for real )to groggily make my way downstairs to
see Kung Fu Panda, feeling a slight touch of doubt that maybe I hadn't woken and made it off
that floral-print couch after all…
Thanks, Stephen King - now even my nap-times have a touch of
horror to them.
July 5 - Time Traveling The Web
Having been using the internet since it's earliest consumer
days of slow modems and small monitors, I recall seeing many websites blossom
and grow. While many more vanished into the digital ether. While I enjoy the
current crop of millions of complicated websites, I also find myself from time
to time yearning for the simpler days when websites were all hand-coded and
simpler to navigate. Thanks to The Wayback Machine and Screenshots.com, I can still
take a visual time-travel tour of what many websites looked like almost back to
their very beginnings. It's a nostalgic tour, to be sure, but it's also
important to remember where all this digital congestion CAME from, how we went
from simple to overload, from Celeron to cell phone and soon beyond. Go take a
trip back; you'll be surprised at what you dig up!
July 6 - Robots are people too?
When will the Age Of Robots arrive, I wonder, and in what
form? Most predictions had them cleaning our homes by now… yet all we really
have are Roombas. Where are the tireless helpers and companions to ease our
daily burdens so we can focus more on improving the world for everyone? And
what are the implications of trying to create such a world? Filmmaker Spike
Jonze took a unique look at this in his short film "I'm Here"
released on YouTube, which is most emphatically worth it's 30-minute length:
July 7 - Perfect Dictation
Today was a productive day for my novel: with my mother's
help typing, I was able to produce an entire chapter in a single day. Being
able to visualize the scenes in my mind's eye and just dictate the words as
they flowed from observing the scene is a marvelous method of writing . It's
how using voice recognition SHOULD be, instead of having to pause every two or
three sentences to correct incredibly bad grammatical errors, which takes you
right OUT of the mental visualizations. 'Producing Mud' as it is called, should
happen when you're in the FLOW( as I mentioned in last week's blog ). When
various distractions keep poking at you, your mind can't focus on the task of
writing and it becomes a grind that's nowhere near the potential you can reach while
writing distraction-free. It was very freeing today to be able to write like
that while sparing my arms, to simple have the words appear as I spoke them
from the order that I set them in first in my mind. At this rate, I should be
able to produce almost a chapter a day, following the outline that I've been
revising for the last few months and adding to it as I go along. Having twenty
or so chapters of my novel by month's end will be enormously freeing!
July 8 - Who or What is Mr. Breakfast?
If it's breakfast, it has bacon - at least in my eyes. I
like unique breakfasts too… and what's more unique than an animated film short
where breakfast comes to life? Or at least, a man's soul takes on the form of
breakfast… or something. Watch it and decide for yourself - thanks to Mike for
sharing this one!
After coming back to
my apartment Sunday night, I was pleased to find it a cool 72F degrees even
with the windows closed - boding well for the warmer days of summer to come
with no A/C!Too bad there's still excessive noise above; combine that with my wonky arms and I'm still better off working at my parent's place for the majority of this month. Creative productivity has been happening in spades!
