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Friday's Word Count: 23591

Yesterday's Word Count: 20443

I did it, I made my week goal. Yay! Yay!

I'm not really done for the week, though. I've got a story that I need to submit right away and while I was busy concentrating on writing, one of the Chymera people posted stuff for critiquing, not to mention the critters RFDR I'm doing, and the regular critters stuff…
…I'll probably leave the critting for Monday again, though. I need to spend some time with my family.

Yesterday's Word Count: 18862

Just 1062 needed to make my week goal.
If I make it will be the first time I've actually made a week goal since I started working on Eyes.
That'll feel good.
Unfortunately I seem to be feeling fuzzier than usual this morning, and I don't seem to be ready to plunge right in and get it done.

Must…. get…. brain…. in…. gear.

I could work on webpages, I suppose, although that can be rather dangerous, because that's a project that easily can last all morning. Hmm…
I know, I'll put a timer on.

Yesterday's word count: 17820

That means I wrote 1173 words yesterday. I knew that write to much problem would even itself out.

At least I'm in pretty good shape for catching up on monday's missed wordage. I've only got 104 words to split between two days. That's easy. As yesterday's count proclaims, I regularly do that much over just by accident.

It occurs to me that if I'm going to post the updated elf picture somewhere, I need somewhere to post it. Most of my graphics endeavors are related to my writing and can go on my writing website, but not all of them.
I guess that's what I should be doing with the space my ISP provides. 🙂
Make a gallery page, and add it to the brand new link section I have just added to the blog sidebar. (At least, I hope it's added. I guess I need to publish this and check.)

Yesterday's word count: 16647

That was 1723 in one day, which isn't spectacular for one day if I was trying to see how much I could write in a day, but that was just what happened during my regular morning write session.

If I could do that every day, or even most days, I could change my goal to 1500 words a day /7500 a week, and I could aim for two books a year instead of three every two years…

That sort of math is dangerous though. I need to learn *consistant* and until I know I've got that down I don't dare push. So I'm not going to try do that again today. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not….
How many times do I have to repeat that before I've convinced myself?

I guess now that I've gotten past the fun conversation I was doing yesterday, just sitting down to write something else will probably convince me.

Azure had the idea of little tiny elves living in our house while she was playing a doll game. The concept was a lot like the Littles, or the Borrowers, but I don't think she's ever run into the Littles or the Borrowers. I said I thought it would make really cute pictures in Poser, but Azure doesn't want to do pictures in poser. So I did one.

P.S: (May 2nd, 2004)
I have now posted a slightly updated version at the Lavender Dreamscapes Website.

Yesterday's Word Count : 13898

I have recently fallen into a pattern that disturbs me. I get up and my brain doesn't seem to want get moving quite yet, so I do email as a warm up, and spend all morning polishing up some message or other, and either get to story writing way later than I want, or worse, not at all.
So my new plan is to blog before writing, using the blog to get my brain in gear rather than email. (Some people might be able to do it, but I somehow doubt I will ever have so much to say in a blog that it takes me all morning to write one entry).
So far this week I have written only 2032 words. This is Friday. To make my quota I need to either write 3K words today, or more believably 1.5K today, and the same again tomorrow. I have been hoping that I would get with it enough that I made my quota Mon-Friday leaving weekends open for critiquing. Sigh!
Trying to do 3000 words today I think would be a bad idea. So do I try for half that, or do I just aim for my daily quota, do crits tomorrow (I'm a dedicated reader for someone's novel, I need to get it done before I earn any credits for it, and if I don't have enough credits, Chymera won't make it to the end of the queue and get posted.) I think I'm going to just worry about today. My recent word counts haven't been such as to convince me that writing 1500 words today is even possible.
So I'm off to arrange for Serena's meeting with some scientists and to get Bambi in an argument with Algernon. Cheers!

Word Count: 12951

I've been getting infections, Boyd's been on vacation, the kids had a snow day…
I have, however, done some critting, and submitted Cantata to the critters' queue, finally, and been doing some poking around trying to put to gether a script to help me with the horrible names-in-a-thousand-languages problems, and I've gotten *some* writing done, just not as much as I think I ought.

Boyd bought himself a copy of Settler's of Catan, finally. So we've been swapping sheep for wheat like crazy over the past couple of days. Yesterday was a snow day, our kids were home from school, so we invited a friend over and played some more.

Settlers has this one serious drawback. You can only play it with three or four players. And in our family we have *five* people interested in the game. So as soon as you finish one game the person or persons left out immediately start clamouring that they want to play. The metagame dynamics have occasionally got rather interesting.

Word Count: 8311

Was reading comments on Talking with Winds.
'Too generic, if you want to sell it you are going to have to insert something unique.'
I could make fairly major changes to Cantata and all it took was a bit of thinking to see what would fit. But they were changes because the story was obviously broken, and I knew it was in trouble while I was writing it, and I hardly had to change anything in the first half to fix it, either. Trying to come up with a change to make to “fix” a story that isn't inherently broken sounds… less doable.

Besides, for me the delight of Racciman's World has always been the “generic done right” aspect of it. There is a *reason* why there are elves and humans and dwarves and etc. There's even a reason why they all speak the same language. Samanth's talent isn't supposed to reveal animals that, because the linguistic barrier has been breached, now sound just like humans — but animals whose communications are realistically limited to actual animal communications. I can't do “generic done right” without also being generic.
So maybe Song of Asolde will never be published. Or maybe it will only be published after I've made a name for myself with other books. I dunno, but at the moment I'm very dubious that I will be able to add in some gimick to make it more publishable without, for me, ruining what is the point of the whole thing.

Next question. Is Eyes sufficiently “un-generic” to get published?
Once again, I'm playing with standard genre conventions… although in a different genre.

I *like* reading typical stuff done well, I don't, as a reader demand something usual or unique in every book. I read *regencies* for heaven's sake, where I go… “Oh look, another wife won in a card game plot,” or “oh look, another gentlewoman forced into business plot” and so forth. It's the details and the quality of the writing and so forth that make the book worth reading, not some new “gimick”. I mean, gimicks are cool when you meet them and they work, but I get tired of the “gimick of the month club”. And you, know, I think there's a bit of a scarcity of straight forward gimickless adventure coming out. Whenever I think I've found one I seem to discover that it's been gimicked with some new form of ickyness. “S&M sex, hey, that ought to sell… child abuse — that's a good twist.” Gack! It makes me think maybe I'd rather buy another Burroughs than risk anything new.

At least Cantata doesn't strike anyone as being generic.
But I would rather not find myself writing *only* Cantata type stories. I like more variety than that.

4382
Another 800 word day.
But I've started on Serena's pov, and I'm already leaving placeholders for names. Need to get some kind of name generator software working or I'm going to go nuts.

2769
Haven't got up to the barbarian invader types yet, so it's all Bambi and Terrence.
I need to decide what level of light I want. If I'm after out and out pastiche, I'm missing my mark.