What a way to spend the weekend
Posted by mcummings
For the second time in about three years, I was afflicted with a rash this weekend that was fairly debilitating. It started with an itch on Thursday - the kind of itch that spreads and burns, and before I knew it, my shoulders, face, arms, and random bits were covered in hot red welts. Kim's first thought was shingles, and there were definitely similarities.
Don't get my wrong - I had my doubts on the diagnosis from the start. I didn't eat anything new on Thursday, nothing out of the ordinary, and if it was a food reaction why would I still be in suffering pain on Saturday night? But now on day two of the full suite of medicines, I am forced to concede a little bit.
Of course, whimpering in pain for most of the weekend doesn't lend itself to accomplishing much. I jotted down a scene addition to the story I'm working (yay, another 1100 words), which on the one hand completes the set of scenes I had envisioned for the story. Unfortunately, that leaves me with the hard part - actually pulling the story together.
I'm trying a new approach to writing this story (this time around; it isn't my first attempt at writing this story, and none of the attempts look anything alike except for the core "Big Idea" thread).
Get it all out
First step is to just write it all out. Disregard the internal editor, putting it in order, or making sure you are in the least bit consistent. Write. Write. Write. Get down on paper or screen, whatever your medium (or in my case, a combination of the two) every thought, scene, dialog, or bit that is relevant to the telling of your story. Don't look back. Don't correct. Don't reread or reconsider anything you've written. If you decide to take a new direction mid-sentence, take it, but don't correct anything before it. Get it all out.
Organize it
Go through the story once and put it in order. Put the scenes together in the order you want to present them in. Maybe this requires six editor windows to be open at once, or scissors and a heavy supply of paper and tape/paste. Whatever. Put it in order.
First edit
For me at least, this works best if the piece is printed out, double space (plenty of room for scribbles). Read through it, make word corrections, scene edits, etc. This means have plenty of paper and toner on hand, and for me, begging the indulgence of my wife since I'm stealing the printer she runs her home business on to print out 30 or so pages on a frail printer.
Pause
At this point, you have to make a judgment call. For me, looking over the story after the first pass, I had to make notes where the dialog sucked, where there were gaps in the logic, and where entire blocks either need to be added or removed. For me, this means going all the way back to step one and starting over again. And again. And again.
The finish
Presumably, after the nth iteration of the above steps, you will have before you a story that you feel is coherent, and that successfully relays the tale you had set out to entertain with. I'll let you know when I get here 
Personally, I have two beta readers I intend to send this to (ladies, you know who you are), because I know they will both give me honest criticisms once they finish with the pleasantries. Sharing before this point is folly, though - sharing something that is only partially done and incompletely conceived leaves you open to false praise. The reader can tell the work isn't finished, isn't done being thought out, and can offer very little other than "its nice, good work, keep it up." Maybe your ego needs that, we all feed the beast differently, but for me its to hollow to sup on.
And now, despite feeling better, I need a rest. The combination of pills is making me a little sleepy again, which should make work just *great* tomorrow (thank goodness for the vanpool!)
Well, it’s not Scottish, that’s for sure
Posted by mcummings
As the old SNL sketch says, if it's not Scottish, its crap! After procrastinating to the max this weekend by exploring editors, writing assistants, etc., I broke down and opened up my short in abiword, inserted page breaks between scenes, and printed it off for a first draft review. I'm surprised the paper didn't turn brown in my hands it stunk that bad, and no, this isn't a case of being more critical of your own work than others. My biggest problem when I went back over it was realizing how true "Show, don't tell!" is - parts of it read like a bad sci-fi novel from the fifties. "As you all know, this event we were all present for and that is considered common knowledge, which we all witnessed happen but that I have to go into boring detail to re-explain to you slightly addled participants" type writing. Ack.
In a close tie for first place though is the apparent disconnect between brain and keyboard. Entire sections of dialog existing solely in my head appear to remain there, with only broken bits making it into the story, resulting in a discordant, discombobulated story that stretches the ability to follow without high dosages of medication.
In other words, the damned thing is crap. But, I finished the first draft. Small solace, I know, but now I have something that I can tweak and fix and work on. I knew that if I tried catching and correcting these problems before, I'd end up in an endless loop of editing and perfecting that might pull out a good story, but that would never translate as a technique to use on anything larger.
OK, off to work for me, and for planning on inserting the missing scenes and dialogue that should make sense of this story. Not to mention hacking out the infected bits. Toodles!
yWriter4
Posted by mcummings
Just a quick note before I get to what's on my mind this morning. I gave http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html a whirl this weekend. Kudos to Simon on an excellent concept well executed. In a nutshell, yWriter lets you organize a work of fiction by helping you break out all of the components (location, characters, notes, etc.), and keeping them available and attached as you build scenes. Not perfect for short stories (its build more around the concept of writing a novel), but still a most amazing tool that I'd recommend to windows users out there.
I, unfortunately, hit a bug with it. I don't know if its a limitation of wine (which it does run in), the software itself, or the fact that I'm on a ten year old piece of junk, but after organizing everything when I went in to edit scenes I found myself having plenty of time to think as the words I wrote appeared on the screen one letter at a time over the course of a few minutes. CPU was spiked to the hilt, which leads me to believe that this is more of a Mikey hardware issue than anything else (you'll note I've complained similarly about web browser performance lately).
Though the software isn't perfect for short story writing, with a touch of creativity it serves the need just fine (just imagine your story is a chapter in a book with one chapter and you're all set 
I'd give it 8 out of 10 stars.
Arrr, a Mastermind
Posted by mcummings
Aye, took ye olde typology test again, came out INTJ again. Seems like an ego boost to this pirate, but a jolly good read. Disagree and you'll be walking the plank.
Oh, and lest I forget, Happy Talk Like a Pirate day! Shiver me timbers!!
Shouldn’t have taken a break yesterday
Posted by mcummings
Two night ago I finished the first of the roughest rough drafty drafts of a short story. Needs some blanks filled in, and I'm still on the fence for an ending, and there's plenty of room for improvement, but none of that's the point. I wrote a story, start to finish about 5000 words currently (right in the sweet spot for being a short story), in less than four days.
I already knew some of the revisions I wanted to make before I finished writing the other night, but I held out because I knew if I started tweaking the structure now, if I allowed myself to start making edits before getting all of the initial words out of my head, then I would be doomed. How do I know this? Because this is the path I have traveled far too many times in the past.
But then yesterday, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to take a day off. I'd finished my first goal (the 5k mark is a big deal to me), I deserved a short break to get some sleep.
Bah. Big mistake. Now I find myself floundering with motivation to open up the two discordant text files that compose the story and begin the merging (and noting) process. I distract myself with facebook msgs to my wife (who is sitting four feet away right now); by writing blog entries; by doing just about anything I can that isn't what I know I should be doing, which is opening up that story and getting it back together.
Maybe that's my cue...