Thought-Drive

I'm happy to say I'm back in the swing of things. Supportive friends of mine ask me sometimes if I've been writing, and it's a difficult question to answer for me, like most. I work on stories pretty much everyday, after all, ponder on how to improve things I've written and on how to improve on things I've even yet to write. There's even some storytelling in my hobbies that make me think on character development, story pacing, and line writing. Ultimately though, for the past month and a half, the answer to the question has been no, I haven't been writing. But all that changed this Sunday. Now I'm back to lying awake on nights late in the week looking into the mental file of an outline I have in my head. I think about what's happening next, and why it's important, who's involved, and where their place is in the overall setting. Lately, I would say my excitement over it has to do a lot with its familiarity. When it's all said and do...

The vacation is over, in more ways than one. I won't get into the messy personal details, but a few quotes come to mind. Favorites include, "you've still got options, even when there's a gun pointed at your head," and  "I've learned that 10% of life is what happens to me and 90% is how I respond to it." Which is to say that I find myself under the gun, and the past few days have encouraged me to carefully mull over my response to recent events. One response I've decided on is not to stop writing, and I'm happy to say that it felt very natural, that decision. Before the news came, I had been editing through my sci-fi manuscript, cringing at points, and remembering why I did it in the first place at others. When I was done, I felt good, and the notes for the next book flowed freely, and have continued to even through the present (though, admittedly, I haven't slept very well). A related response is that I'm also going to revisit the ...

A good friend being good to me strongly encouraged me to write this weekend, because I hadn't in some time. What I had been doing was blazing a trail through the box of games the same friend bequeathed to me (okay so maybe he isn't so good). I stumbled across a fascinating parallel between the writing in games and the writing in books in that I found myself, as the main character, wondering why I should care about certain details and regretting not having as much information as I should've had to connect with the story material. "This," I thought to myself as I wandered around aimlessly, "is what bad writing feels like to a reader." However, what I was doing could not be expressly described as researching. But I did write, and for the first time in a long time no one will be able to see what it is I put down. On about the third page, my computer restarted, saving nothing of what I had written. I searched and searched when it finally booted back up to ...