Little updates on my writing
957 words today.
I got a little stuck today. I spent a few hours letting it simmer, and finally managed to going again. I've found that playing some ambient stuff on Youtube helps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IhjZuW9jMk
It's been pretty helpful for locking out the world and just being in my head with the story.
That's about all.
I made a lot of small revisions, and added some details. I also started drawing a map of the world.
Went back through and started sprinkling little tidbits of backstory in my dialog. I have quite a bit of backstory for the world written up in my lexicon, and a whole lot of details about other things going on in the world while my main character is doing her thing.
I usually start by making a lexicon, and it's just that, a file named “lexicon.txt”. This is where I jot down notes and ideas about my story. Usually a paragraph with the basic idea, and then as I go I add names of characters and little tidbits of information about them, for me to refer back to later on.
My main character was just the name, with a description of “main character”. I have a major supporting character that I also started writing up notes on, and then kept writing more notes. I had a lot of ideas for this character, and didn't intend for the main character to meet this character right away.
I started writing, and got about fifteen pages in before I realized that I was writing mostly about this supporting character. More and more ideas about her backstory, and where she lived, kept coming, and I'd written almost nothing about the main character. It became obvious that the main character is not the main character, this supporting character is the main character. So I backed up to the beginning, and started over again.
Once again, I got a few pages in, and then I realized I was starting in the wrong place. It was the middle of the story, or maybe a little more toward the end, and there was a lot of backstory to cover. So, I started over again.
I wrote 1,832 words today.
I know, cheesy title. Moving on.
I started writing short stories as soon as I was able to write with a pencil. I made stick-figure comics, which I would staple together like a comic book, and I thought they were pretty fantastic. When I was eleven years old, my grandparents bought me an electric typewriter (keep in mind, this was the late 80s, because I'm that old). It was one of the fancy ones that remembered what you were typing, and had white-out built into it. It was very easy to have it backtrack and white things out, then pick up where you left off.
I figured out all the bells and whistles pretty quickly, and started pumping out stories every wee or so. My mother would raid the supply closet where she worked to keep me in paper and ink. We were poor, and that's how it was. Were she alive today, I don't think she'd be offering any apologies.
In the eighth grade, I took a creative writing class. Up until that point, I hated everything about school, but this changed that. I genuinely enjoyed the class, and I aced it. We had nice Macintosh computers to work with, and I had my own green 5 ¼-inch floppy disk which I kept my stories on. I often had to wait after school for my mother to pick me up, so I'd spend that time typing away on a computer in the rear of the room, which I had decided was my favorite.
Then, my sophomore year, I took another writing class. Loved it. Aced it. Not much else to comment on there. Finally, in college, I took yet another one, with the same results. Although I found this class dramatically more challenging. My peers were now critiquing my work, and the professor, a local author, was genuinely interested in helping us become better writers. I felt like I was getting a handle on writing stuff someone else might actually want to read.
To say that life took over after college, is being pretty liberal. Life was more like a dump truck, crashing through my little china shop and giving me both fingers as it started to circle around for another pass. I owned my own PC after college, and tried to keep writing, but was managing less and less as I trudged through the usual near-poverty that most early twenty-year-old Americans experience.
Over the next fifteen-ish years, I tried to write, but never got there. Occasionally, I'd churn out twenty or thirty pages of something, or I'd pick up an old story and start re-working it. The problem was always that I was so busy that I couldn't regularly write, which is important when you're on fire about an idea. Well, for me anyway, I have to be able to write a few hours a day on it, or it'll fizzle out and I'll lose interest. I also stopped reading books. There was never any space for it, too many distractions, and I had a lot to keep up with.
Then, in late 2023, I fell into the worst depression of my life. Once I realized my situation, I got back into therapy, and I started an antidepressant. It also turned out that I was dealing with a hormonal problem that was not only affecting me emotionally, but messing with my sleep, and making me gain weight. My doctor started me on HRT. All of these things occurred in the span of a few weeks, and not long after that, I started feeling better. Very little about my circumstances changed, but I wasn't so overwhelmed by things anymore. We did make some changes, and I had to tighten up boundaries at work and at home, in order to give myself more space. My interest in photography and games picked up again, and I started tinkering with programming and my little electronic projects around the house.
In the summer of 2024, I started reading again. Not a lot, not like I used to, but I was reading for fun again, instead of just reference stuff for work. Then, back in December, I was hit with a story idea. It kept coming, and I started jotting down notes, and building a bit of the world around it, and then in January, I started writing. I'd write during my lunch hour at work. At home, I'd put on headphones and sit on the couch with my laptop. I started getting down about a thousand words a day. So, I'm writing again, and I hope it sticks around.
I decided to occasionally post about it here, just to get some of my other thoughts about it down somewhere. If nothing else, I'll post how many words I type each day.