Developing Upwards

My NaNoWriMo attempt will not complete during the competition dates, but that doesn't mean I count it a failure. Most days I'm getting some words in, some days only a hundred or two and others a couple thousand. I keep at it, and I keep solving problems in my attempt to tell the story before me. I won't win NaNoWriMo, but I will finish my novel. That's the thing I care about. NaNoWriMo is a great event and I hope to win one day, but right now what it represents for me is a springboard towards my dream of finishing and publishing a novel. I'm not going to let that same inspiration be a weight that drags me down, so not completing my 50,000 words before the end of this month isn't a failure. It is just the reality of finishing this novel. The truth is, if I don't, it isn't about what I did or didn't do today. The larger factor is how rusty and out of touch I am with writing. It takes practice, like any skill, and I am woefully lacking in that ...

Day 7 I took a deliberate break, as a gamble. I was feeling some strain and I needed to show myself that I can take a break when I need it, so I spent the evening watching a movie with my son ( Honey, I Shrunk the Kids ) instead of writing that evening. I decided to catch up starting this weekend, but slowly instead of trying to do enormous days that would just kill me. 2000 words a day is enough to catch up over the next week without pushing myself too hard, and I do think I can do that. I did 2200 words on November 8th, and they were good words and a scene I was happy with. I'm feeling good. There are a lot of questions about how to get through some of the "rising action" that needs to happen between now and the planned summit of my story, but I'm feeling ever more confident that I can get there. Not just that I can get there, but that I can get there through an engaging story that someone might enjoy reading. I'm really feeling good about this. So,...

Today was my worst day writing yet. I spent two hours writing less than 300 words. What doesn't make sense is I had a better idea what I wanted to write today than I have had on any of the days up to this, so how did I have so much more trouble getting that down? I had the scene I wanted to write all worked out ahead of time, at least the basics. I was making it all up as I went up to here and I was able to write a lot better than this. Maybe knowing something up front caused me to second guess myself like what I was writng didn't match up? I don't know, but i need to get over it. I still haven't finished the scene. My plan to catch up is to write 1500 tomorrow and then 3000 on both Saturday and Sunday. I think that will get me where I need to be. On the weekend I'm going to find an hour each day and write out on the porch in the cool air. Some change of scenery would be good. See all my posts about NaNoWriMo 2014

I ended today with only 6671 words. Staying on par would have been 6667 so I was only four words over, and worse I only wrote 1600 words today. That's technically under goal for the day, but I'm on pace for the month. I made the mistake of not getting even a little writing time in during the morning, before work, so I had everything to do sitting down at night. If I aim to get back on track I need to get in 30 minutes tomorrow morning and the mornings after that, giving myself a head start for the day. Jory MacKay's How I Forgot to Write was a particularly personally hitting piece to read as my daily writing motivation. If we aren't careful we can let the skills we have wane and that is certainly something I think happened to me at some point in the last five years, and regaining those skills is a big part of what I'm doing NaNoWriMo. The six-step program outlined is full of gems. Among the two that I hold most closely to my own writing: Find a routine and Lear...

Yesterday I did my best to make up some of the time I lost in an opening day that knocked some of my pride out. I wrote a lot slower than I had anticipated on Saturday and I didn't expect that to change, so I took advantage of a Sunday with little plans to take up my time and had three writing sessions. I wrote around each meal, so three through the day. My son took it upon himself to join me for two of them, and he got a little distracted when he learned what text formatting was in his word processor (Google Docs) but setup upon himself a goal of three sentences a day as a minimum, and more if he more ideas. This is a good goal for an eight year old writer. There is a line I have to walk where I'm not encouraging him enough on one side and I'm just trying to push him because I want to share writing with him on the other. He didn't want to write on Monday, but I let it slide because of the balance I need to keep on that line. I ended yesterday above schedul...

Word Count: 2075 / 50,000 Today I began the first writing of my 2014 entry in the popular NaNoWriMo contest. This is my second entry, but I haven't finished the challenge in the past and hope this year is the first i make it. I feel good about it. As part of this, I'm trying to read more and read more about writing, too. An exerpt from todays piece on writing, This Is Your Brain on Writing by Damien Walter: During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech. Damien continues to lay out three problems caused by this disconnect in mental approach. I recommend reading his post .  See all my posts about NaNoWriMo 2014

I want to write more often. I’ve been writing more lately and I hope to continue that, and I think expressing why this is important to me is valuable so here is that post. I want to explore my thoughts more concretely and have a record of how I came to my stands on the positions I believe in, and I want to keep track of the ideas for stories I have. Rather than have some bothering me constantly, I want to feel safe that I can forget things. Writing ideas can also get them out of your mind. The act of writing about it can often free your mind from the burden of so many thoughts. You can be more confident in an idea, or let it go out of your mind now that you’ve written it somewhere safe and permanent. I like the idea of turning my thoughts into essays. A thought is ill-defined. A thought is hard to grasp, even inside your own head. Thoughts are connections between so many points in your mind, but a well written essay is a single coherent position. It is a statement at a time ...

Along the side of my blog, for many years. I've had a section called "Top Articles". I don't remember when I put it there, but I know that it included all of the most popular posts I had written at the time and I wanted to make them more prominent. They were obviously popular topics people wanted to find. These were the things I was writing about that people found most interesting or useful. I haven't thought a lot about this list for a few years, until I just noticed it today. Top Articles  is a time capsule. This was a snapshot of my interests and knowledge from a previous version of myself. It doesn't reflect me as well today. I'm equally interested in the things that no longer worth keeping on that list as I am of the things that are still very important to me. I'll make a point to clean things up around here. What was on that list so long ago? Of no surprise, I had a number of posts about Python which still draw a lot of new readers t...

Reposted from  my post on Medium... I did not love the words I put on the page the last time I sat down to write.   I’m trying to process this feeling and I think that appropriately I’ll do so through writing even more. Maybe I’ll love these words, or maybe they’ll hurt like a toe stubbed on the sofa. Is this really coming out of my head? I can spend days or weeks “meaning to write” but never finding the time (what a lie) and when I finally sit down and get a measly few hundred words down, this is what I get? It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right that anything so useless would be all my reward for getting my shit together and spending a whole half an hour in front of the keyboard. Obviously, I need a reality check.   There are going to be  so many  more bad writing sessions. I’m going to write so many  crappy paragraphs, useless pages, and awful chapters that just have to be thrown away. I’m going to have to, if I want to get to the good ones...

LONG DAY. Frustrated with the results today, but I am happy that I'm still on track. This is why I got extra words in the first two days! Daily Goal: 1666 Today: 967 Total: 5005 Remaining: 44995 Remaining Daily: 1606 from my tumblr post

I love how the story is revealing itself. I am not planning much, but many possibilities are popping into my head as I start to make connections in the story. Partly i wonder if i should avoid them, maybe they are too obvious since i thought of them just from what i’ve written? I don’t know. I’ll probably run with it, I need the material, after all. What is Roshyn after, anyway? Daily Goal: 1666 Today: 2028 Total: 4038 Remaining: 45962 Remaining Daily: 1584 from my Tumblr post

I started my novel. I hate the first thousand words, which were just meandering and going no where. I stumbled on something interesting for the second thousand. Daily Goal: 1666 Today: 2010 Total: 2010 Remaining: 47,990 Remaining Daily: 1600 Today was a Good Writing Day. Even though I could not write in the morning, and only was able to get 300 words on the bus, I still finished out ahead. from my Tumblr post

I have signed up for NaNoWriMo 2011 with a novel draft I’ll be writing named The Compass and The Leash . I’ll make some notes here each day as I go. Mirrored from my Tumblr post

So, this was going to be a post about the Python module, subprocess. I'm a big fan of subprocess and there are a lot of problems that are easier to solve by using it. We reduce thirteen distinct facilities into one class. We reduce a diverse ecosystem of interfaces into one, uniform interface. The subprocess module is good, both by itself and as a symbol for what Python stands for. I won't be writing my original post about subprocess. It isn't that subprocess isn't important, or that I don't think I can express myself properly, but that it brought up something else I should write about right now: What should I write about? Is this a blog about software development or is this a blog about Python development? Does it need to be only one? I'm looking for my direction here. I'm not going to stretch this out, because if I do, you won't read it . And truth be told, I want you to read it. I want you to enjoy reading what I write. At heart, I am a writer. I take...