And April’s stats were somewhat better … I think it’s a lot easier to do more words/hour when I’m working on a novel.
WORDS WRITTEN: 2170
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 6.7
WORDS/HOUR: 323.9
April 2014 Stats
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March 2014 Stats
As you might guess by the date on this blog post, writing has been going slowly. The upside: next month’s stats almost have to be better!
WORDS WRITTEN: 973
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 4.2
WORDS/HOUR: 231.7
February Stats
Finished editing one short story and finished two chapters in the novel … but it was still a slow month. How was your February?
WORDS WRITTEN: 2135
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 8.5
WORDS/HOUR: 251.2
Killing Your Darlings
There’s a phrase used in writing that you have to “kill your darlings”. I don’t think that means that if you like something, you should automatically cut it. What I do think it means is that if something isn’t working for the story, even if you love it, you have to cut it.
While editing my current WIP, I realized that I was letting the main character off the hook in the middle of the story and that the tension died at that point. The way I let her off the hook had some funny lines that I really liked. I didn’t want to cut them. But I did. And it worked—the tension increased.
Are you willing to kill your darlings?
January Stats
This was a month of editing: totally rewrote one story and started a simpler revision on a second. Editing drove my words/hours down, but I did achieve the mythical hour a day on average, although I didn’t quite succeed at writing every day. How was your January?
WORDS WRITTEN: 4371
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 32
WORDS/HOUR: 136.6
Macro Ice
We had another round of winter today with freezing rain and icicles. The frozen rain collected on a palm and made a great macro photography subject. I enjoy macro photography because it lets me see the world in a new way.
What do you do to see the world in a new way?
What Catches Your Attention
Here along the Gulf Coast, it doesn’t freeze very often, so when it does, we all run outside with our cameras to document the rare event. I’ve discovered that icicles make a really nice subject. The last time we had icicles, what caught my attention was the reflection of the trees inside the drops at the ends of the icicles. This time, finding the reflections didn’t interest me. What caught my attention instead was the rim of ice along the roofline.
To some extent, I think that writing is the same way. Even if two writers (or one writer at different times) started with the same story plot, characters, and theme, what catches their attention would be different, and they’d produce two different stories.
What caught your attention today?
Full Moon
The full Moon: beauty in lava flows and impact craters.
The Moon with Jupiter
Driving home this evening, I was struck by the beautiful sight of the nearly full Moon with Jupiter. With the dynamic range of the human eye, Jupiter looked quite bright while the Moon had some detail. With the more limited dynamic range of the camera, I could not capture the range. The picture of the pair below was taken with two two-stop graduated neutral density filters, and yet Jupiter (to the left) is hard to see and the Moon lacks detail. I was pleased with how my unfiltered pictures of the Moon solo turned out. Enjoy!
Clever Bubble
I am very pleased that Perihelion Science Fiction has published my story “Clever Bubble.” You can find it here:
One of the fun bits of writing this story was designing the game that the aliens play with Will. I wanted to have something like soccer, but with four teams and played in three dimensions. (Actually, I had originally considered having eight teams, but it got too complicated.) Each team has their own goal (the arrows’ mouths) at one corner of a vertical square, and each team has their own ball (Will is the ball for his team). After each time a team scores by getting its ball into another team’s goal, the goals can be re-arranged to make it more difficult for a team to score where they need to. In order to win, a team has to have scored on all the other teams more recently than they have scored on it. So it’s a game of strategy as well as motion. Will, as an intelligent soccer ball, only figures out how to score and not how to keep score. But now you know how to do both!
I hope you enjoyed the story.
Space&Aliens 