I really need to find a way to update this blog more often than almost weekly (almost). On the one hand, I think there’s only so much blathering a person can take (and I know blathering – a day or two without checking my own feeds results in a hundred and fifty unread posts to weed through).
Yesterday we spent a nice Mother’s Day at my in-law’s place. Unlike in past visits, the TV was kept off the whole time, which put the kids (TV addicts) in an unusual predicament. We had the toys we’d brought along for the youngest (2.5 yr old), but nothing really for the older two to do. Four hours into the cone of silence, Katy, our 7 year old, begins to tell a story with the little people and their equipment (I was so moved I even logged on for a second to twitter about it). Initially she called it “The Salvation of the Machines,” later changing the title to “The Invasion of the Machines,” it was the nice, homespun tale only a seven year old could tell about The Singularity Event. Yes, I watched with both puzzlement and pride as Katy told a tale of how the machines rebelled because they were tired of “the humans” telling them where to go and what to do, and about the great war they fought, until eventually “the humans” moved to a place without machines so they could live in peace.
Just imagine if she’d been old enough to watch the BSG reboot.
In my own story telling arena, I find myself making greater strides when I’m pressed for time on the way to and from work than I do the rest of the week. I’ve been averaging about a thousand words for each leg of the trip, which is fantastic. When I have the time to devote to it at home – lucky if I scrape a few hundred words.
Go figure.
One thing I have come to realize is that my initial outline is insufficiently short. It was 26 chapters long, I’m already half way through it, and realizing that I have just begun to tell this story. That’s great except it means I need to bulk that outline up quite a bit, plus account for the parts where my imagination stepped in to expand and elaborate a scene into something usable and ended up adding a new character or item or location that needs to be tracked mentally.
But I don’t want to slow down the progress – its been really nice to see that daily progress bar inching to the right by leaps, so I need to find myself the time to both knock out words (I’d like to hit 30k this week if I can, assuming I can make it to 25k today), as well as fleshing out the outline for another 40 or 50 chapters.
OK, back to work for me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll post about the Moleskine hack I’m using 🙂