Thursday, March 11, 2010

Thursday Thoughts

I meant to be writing yesterday. Instead, I ended up spending most of my time with that previous massive post about my music-listening adventures and then doing up playlists for my car CDs.

At first, I was angry with myself. Then I realized ... with all stress and now-now-now in my life, maybe I just needed the chunk of time to goof off.

Been dippping my toe in the beta read pool with Journal of the Dead. Made sure I saved myself a new copy of the file. I've been trying to preserve each editing pass as a separate file - something I've never done before - so I can consult the difference between versions if needed. I had to consult the original text several times in the second edit because I'd dropped out words while transcribing ... which was not the purpose of this, but good to have, because I would've driven myself nuts trying to figure out what I'd intended to write from context.

Wondering if I should divide my writing folders further into Novels and Shorts ... and maybe Poetry, though that would be a small folder as most of my poems are in the same few documents. (I already have separate folders for business, idea notes and formatted copies.) How does everyone out there do it? I have well in excess of 200 files in my main Writing folder. This is starting to strike me as unwieldy.

Working on another Ishene and Kemel time travel story. This one is set about six years after the one I finished for February, so that puts it about a third of the way to the first story I wrote ... and gives a completely different view of their dynamic. They're boisterous twenty-somethings here, more confident, less brash (for Kemel; Ishene was never brash) and way more comfortable with each other, but haven't settled down into the mature relationship they have later.

If I go for a fourth story (!), I will have to sit down and do a timeline, because I'm going back and forth way too much and constantly referring to events that happened in between. For instance, the story start I have for a free write is the first time anyone has been permitted to time travel into the future ... and we get the backstory right away that Ishene is mourning for her late fiance.

I may also need a canon guide for myself. This is why I don't write series stories! The details are too hard to remember when it's been six months since I wrote the last one!

Yeah, that definitely deserved some exclamation marks. ;-)

1 comment:

Aubrie said...

I have a separate folder for short stories! Soulds like your folder is getting too big! I also keep different versions of my manuscript until I go over the edits and decide whether or not to use them. ( I used all of yours, thank you very much and am very much enjoying control return) :)