The Writing Week

I got a good bit done, not absolutely everything I'd thought of, but enough to be pretty satisfied:

- Rewrote the Gambling short story completely from scratch, redrafted the whole thing, then edited it and it's now all in the envelope ready to post.

- Drafted the Sandtimer short story

- Drafted an article about healthy eating 'round the work day

- Sorted out the novel spreadsheet of agents contacted

- Made a spreadsheet to keep track of short stories (so I know when the deadline-for-notifying-winners was for each -- there's three I can start sending out to market now...)

- Jotted down a few more ideas for the novel

- Revised, printed & enveloped a 250 word piece for a competition

I also managed to catch up on some emails/letters. A pretty good week, all in all. I think next week is going to be designated Finishing Off week, for projects hanging around half-complete...

Two short stories drafted

The advantage, of course, of my internet connection being temporarily out of action is that I have done a good bit of writing; two short stories drafted (one of which took three attempts and needs a good 500 words cutting...), a few notes towards the next novel, and most of an article on healthy eating for 9-5ers.

I'm starting to wonder whether I'm wasting my time a bit on the short stories; I quite enjoy doing them, but I tend to write them fairly quickly, redraft hastily, and send them off and forget about them. None of them are exactly my best work.

This weekend, I've got three which I wrote in December/January to go through, and revise, and find potential markets for. It's nice to have some short, complete pieces finally (after years of not writing anything much, then working on a full novel), and I want to get together a portfolio of the better ones.

Another agent (Conville & Walsh) rejected the novel this week -- so it's currently with two, Gillon Aitkin and Curtis Brown. I'm thinking this might also be a good weekend to start the trawl of the Yearbook again...

Zero-configuration wireless (hah!)

It's taken me a good five or six hours, several cups of tea and a lot of cursing.

I've finally managed to get an ad hoc wireless connection working between our shiny Windows Vista desktop and my Windows XP laptop, with internet connection sharing enabled.

The "hahahah, it's ALIVE!" moment came, of course, after two emails to Dell asking if I could return the wireless card, after my declared intentions of going into Peckham tomorrow morning to buy a router and after I said "There's one last thing I'm going to try, then I'm giving up."

Anyway, excuse the lack of updates recently: whilst big and shiny, the Vista PC has IE 7 which appears not to like blogger's cookies very much.

The Plan for The Week

After a lovely weekend spent visiting (and being fed by) various relatives of mine and the Boyfriend's, I feel I should be a tad productive this week.

I'm going for the weekly rather than daily to-do list. Hitting 1,000 words/day was working well for a while, but I find a lot of "writing" involves things which don't rack up words ... brainstorming, editing, getting things into a fit state to be sent out to market.

So this week's list, as scrawled on a spiral notepad, runs:

1. Gambling short story
- Write new one (Rayst?)
- Revise, print, etc.

2. Sort out spreadsheet of agents contacted.

3. Revise short stories
- Decorating Tabitha (longer?)
- Seeing through Fog
- Unburdening
(Check deadlines)

4. Article on 'Exercise 9-5'
- Write companion piece on food
- List possible magazine/online markets

5. Sandtimer short story
- Plan & draft

6. Novel
- Characters, and general brainstorming

It's a good mix of sorting out old stuff (competition entries where the deadline for them notifying winners has passed, so I'm free to send them elsewhere) and new stuff (a couple of short stories for fresh competitions, and the very embryonic stages of a new novel.)

I'll let you know how much of it gets done by Sunday evening...

A five-day week? Eesh!

After two three-day weeks (thanks to bank holidays and taking a couple of days annual leave), this week feels long.

I "finished" the first draft of the long short story on Monday, by rushing the ending -- which is currently not satisfactory, plausible or even right (I know what I want to happen and it hasn't!) But the thing is complete enough for me to leave it for a few weeks before revising. It came to 10,050 ish words in the end, when I'd stared off aiming for 5,000...

Some heavy cuts are needed, and some considerable expansion of stuff I hurried just to get it finished. I wanted it FINISHED on Monday though, and was short on time/energy/patience due to staying late at the day-job. (I love it when bosses find something fiddly and really urgent that I need to do at ten to five...)

Yesterday The Brother came up to visit in the evening, eventually -- a mishap with trains (he got on the wrong one...) landed him at Bromley South. But he made it to Nunhead eventually, and we went to the Nun's Head: lovely pub, especially when my mother has sent me money for a meal out! :-)

I managed to get a little bit done yesterday on a new short story, though (whilst waiting for the Brother to arrive), and did another 1,000 words today. Should have the draft done tomorrow, and hope to complete it at the weekend: it's for this month's Writers' News competition.

Another 1,000

Got 1,000 done this morning (by getting up stupidly early for a Sunday, but we were planning to be out -- and indeed were -- for the rest of the day).

The long short story still isn't over. But it will be soon.

I like this advice from Jodi Picoult in today's Observer:
"You can always edit something bad. You can't edit something blank."

Three Good Writing Days

Got another 1,000 words done on Thursday evening, as per Stephen King's good advice: he suggested a (minimum?) target of 1,000 words a day, 6 days a week.

Not sure how long I'll be keeping that up for...

I took Friday "off" -- from writing, that is, not from the day job -- and went for a nice long walk with the Boyfriend before dinner. It seems worth making the most of the unseasonably good weather before the April rains hit. I was browsing through May's *Writers' News* (my subscription copy had arrived Friday morning) and spotted a letter which looked oddly familiar: they published one I emailed to them a couple of months ago.

I don't know if any of my blog-readers are Writers' News subscribers (though I thoroughly recommend it for anyone with writerly aspirations; it's only available by subscription but its sister publication Writing Magazine comes thrown in at a hefty discount). Still, hopefully I may eventually get my name somewhere which you can check out...

This morning, I got another 1,000 words done, though it felt like heavy going for the first 500-600. I thought I'd better take my letter's good advice and stick with it. And despite subsequent bank queues and repairman woes (possibly more on this on a later post), I feel at least I managed something productive today!

The long short story is now near the end of the first draft (I'm hoping another 1,000 words will do it) -- once it's done, I can begin tearing it to little pieces as it's in a dire state of plot-holes and gaps and things which change half-way through cos I've not put in any revisions to the first few scenes yet...

Hitting the 1,000 mark

Got 1,000 words done yesterday evening, and today, so feeling good about that. They weren't great words (I'm ploughing on teeth-grittedly with a long short story that isn't working) but if I have something on paper, I can at least edit it...

Authors on Writing

I took a couple of extra days around the long Easter weekend, so have had Thurs 6th-Tues 10th off work; it's been a welcome break. The Boyfriend and I spent most of the time in Oxford, with my family.

This gave me a good chunk of time for some reading of a couple of entertaining and enlightening volumes of autobiography/writing advice: Stephen King's On Writing and Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead. Both were excellent, offering amusing and poignant details about the authors' respective childhoods and adult life, as well as imparting a lot of good advice and thoughts about writing.

Atwood's book took a more academic approach (it was developed the series of Empson lectures she gave at Cambridge) but was very readable nonetheless. King's was perhaps a little lighter in terms of style, but not in terms of substance. Both well worth the read, and both buoyed me up somewhat at a time when I've been feeling a touch hollow about my own writing.

A couple of new things to try over the next couple of weeks:
-- Making a weekly, rather than daily, plan of things that I want to get done (both in the day job and life outside it)
-- Setting a writing target (1000 words?) and getting there each day. Doesn't matter what on, so long as I'm writing something. (This one nicked from King's advice.)

The centre of time and space

We went to Greenwich yesterday, and stood on the Meridian line. Good fun, and a spectacular view of London!

Greenwich is well supplied with bargin bookshops. For future reference, I don't recommend buying eight books in the first, then walking round Greenwich, through the tunnel under the Thames & back, up the hill to the Line and Viewing Point, and round the market.

Though my arm muscles definitely feel like they had a good workout... Probably just as well, since Lambeth council are closing Brixton Rec for refurbishment for 3 months.