Sorry for the lack of updates. Life continues to move at breakneck speed while the revisions continue at a more glacial pace. Yesterday I hit the pile of new, hand-written scenes, so there’s a lot more typing going on right now, which is actually a nice change of pace.
A bit of a crazy week, but I pushed myself to make up some of the slack this morning, and like Cindy said, “progress is progress”.
I’ve switched back from words count to scenes revised as it seems to make a bit more sense in that context. I managed two more scenes yesterday, three this morning, and another just now.I’d keep going, but I’m falling asleep at the computer.
I put in the extra time tonight because Tuesday and Thursday mornings are the tough ones, and tomorrow night my oldest daughter is giving a reading of the short story she had published in her elementary school magazine!
Between Kiddo1’s birthday, and Easter I didn’t even try to get any writing in over the weekend. Today’s scene was about 50% new material, so things went a bit slower. I need to figure out how to get in more than 20 minutes a day or this is going to take a long time.
Still plugging along. For those who have asked what a “Type-in” is: My manuscript is covered with hand written notes and rewrites, and I’m now in the process of getting them back into the document.
I’m going to try posting regular updates on my progress here. Things aren’t going as quickly as I hoped. Maybe this will help.
I’ll keep this short, but I wanted to address my lack of writing updates. I managed to make monthly writing updates here for about half the year before they pretty much stopped. At first they stopped because I was to busy actually writing (which was good), then that slowed down (not so good), and I didn’t feel like whining about my reasons here.Miracles, which has been slow going.2
All right. Enough of that. I have scenes to edit.
Yikes! It’s September and I never posted my “Writing Update” for July. I’ve been busy, and one of the things I’ve been busy doing is taking Holly Lisle’s new online course: How to Think Sideways. I’m really enjoying the course, and I’m amazed at how well some of the techniques are working for me.
The first section of the course is all about ideas. If you write anything like me, sometimes you get ideas that seem to almost write themselves. In my case a lot of these had themes of objects that seemed to pop up in multiple otherwise unrelated stories. One of the first things I got out of this course was a much fuller understanding of what this means, how to map out the things that set off my imagination, and how to use this understanding to tap into story ideas in a more “on demand” fashion. It’s like finally having the address for that P.O. Box in Schenectady.
One of my biggest problem with ideas is that I do get a lot of themTalyn, three as examples of what not to do, and the version that sold to Tor (that’s about 150 pages of examples for one lesson).
The second section (which I’m getting into now) is about planning. What to plan. What not to plan. How to avoid over-planning. How to plan and still allow things to grow organically. This is something I’ve struggled with over numerous short stories and three novels, and I welcome any help in making sense of my experiences.
The first run of this course (300 seats) sold out fast. Holly has opened up sign ups between now and September 8th, at 9am EDT on an invitation only basis. If it’s sounds at all interesting, consider yourself invited.
I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’m now an official contributor to MINE. MINE, a pop-culture blog that digs a bit deeper, is the brain child of author/podcaster JC Hutchins, and I’m honored to listed amongst all the other great folks on board.
MINE is your one-stop shop for entertainment news, crazy rumors, Internet memes, whimsical news bites, music, gossip … you name it. We’ve amassed a small army of savvy, slightly-snarky writers — we call them “MINERS” — dedicated to extracting the most fun and interesting stuff from the webscape.
We dig bubblegum pop, video games, TV, podcasts and vidcasts, rock ‘n roll and R&B, movies (if they’ve got fireballs and giant robots, we’re so there), celeb gossip, nutty YouTube videos, the list goes on. Like you, our interests are all over the place, and we’re gunning to be the first online place you visit for the fantastical, fascinating and frivolous.
So far I’ve MINED up something truly evil, and truly awesome, and some incredible new software that will let you walk through your photos. I hope you’ll enjoy my contributions, and be sure to check out all the great content MINE has to offer.
Entries,![[RSS: Posts]](http://jasonpenney.net/wp-includes/images/rss.png)
![[E-Mail: Postsl]](http://jasonpenney.net/wp-content/images/email-icon-16x16.png){kind=icon}
The Dead Zone
On Writing
The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952 (Vol. 1)
Contagious
Paddington Goes to Town (Paddington Bear Adventures)
![[twitter]](http://jasonpenney.net/wp-content/images/icons/twitter-favicon.png "[twitter]"){kind=icon}
Finished revising two scenes. Time to fire up the grill.![[bookmarks]](http://jasonpenney.net/wp-content/images/icons/bookmarks-favicon.png "[bookmarks]"){kind=icon}
Modernizr![[comments]](http://jasonpenney.net/wp-content/images/icons/comments-favicon.png "[comments]"){kind=icon}
Use Google Libraries: A Plugin to Improve Script Loading Performance in WordPress (All the Billion Other Moments)
