Archive for February, 2009

20
Feb
09

Ahead of Schedule in Spite of Twitter


Writer and Muse Succumb to Laziness

After recently rousing myself from a bout of writer’s lethargy (with the help of a motivating kick-start from c), I’ve been on my insane-and-probably-unrealistic writing schedule for a week now.

I’m actually a little ahead of schedule. Not bad, considering I’m outlining 10+ chapters a day. (I tend to write short chapters, so I’m estimating 50 chapters in a 100,000 word book.) The real test will come in less than a week when I have to churn out 5000 words a day (and work at a full-time job).

And all this just after I started tweeting on Twitter. Actually I’m far more a lurker than a tweeter. I’m following Felicia Day (season two of The Guild just ended; I’m hopelessly addicted), Wil Wheaton (now an author, blogger and geek), and a few friends. I had to remove Brent Spiner because he made me laugh too much throughout the day to get any serious work done.

I’ll probably remove everyone except for friends soon, now that I see how people are using Twitter. It reminds me of the early Internet phenomenon where unknown people stuck webcams around their house and allowed you to subscribe and watch their lives. People actually paid to watch a young woman eat her meals, watch TV, and sleep. Day after day after day. With Twitter you can lurk into people’s minds all over the planet. Of course there’s more to it than that, but celebrity following seems that way for the most part.

It’s far too easy to tune in to all the tweets out there and waste inordinate amounts of time. Kind of like YouTube’s related video links.

So far I’ve found no compelling motivation to tweet often. Which is great for my writing.

Oh my, look at that. Right now Felicia Day is drinking a strawberry essence layered with donut-infused milk and topped with espresso.

14
Feb
09

Back to Work

I’m back to work full steam ahead on my WIP, essentially starting fresh. I have a strict schedule, with progress indicated on the sidebar.

I imagine most of my posts will be extremely boring for awhile, for I am putting much less time into the blog so I can focus on writing.
My schedule covers the following phases: Outline, Draft 1, Draft 2, let my primary reader critique, Draft 3, let others critique, Draft 4, and that’s it. This one’s extremely accelerated since I already know the characters, their world, and most of the key plot ideas already.