24,000 In

January 28th 2002 at 7:30 am

Well, up to a lot this weekend. Didn’t do as much writing as I’d hoped for, I mucked about most of Saturday wiping and repartitioning the iMac so I could remap the virtual memory to a swap drive and speed it up a bit. Why? It was good writing avoidance, and I want the iMac to be in tip-top shape. Next major software project on the iMac will be in setting up as a webserver :-)One thing I did do was scan a hand drawn map of Nanagada, the world in which Crystal Rain is set. Then I portioned off the Aztlan section and focused in on the land where all my action is taking place. Fleshed that out a bit, added color and forest and cities, some major defining landmarks, and I’m about getting the size of it down in my head (important now that we’re traveling the through the land). This helps me with some basic stuff like “they were going north to X” when I looked at the map and realized they would actually be “going north-east to X”.I also went back through all previous 15 chapters and revised them. For people who read this journal to see how other writers work, I will share some lay of the land stuff. At Scott Nicholson’s Haunted Computer, his personal website, Scott has some neat articles about himself/the biz/etc up. One of them has this to say about writing his novel Red Church:”Instead of doing multiple extensive revisions, I employed two tricks: daily editing and what I call “writing in circles.” Each day, I edited the previous day’s work. This not only patched up some flaws, it also got me warmed up and back into the story…”I remember Dean Wesley Smith saying something similar. So here’s a snippet of what happens on a typical night in Toby world:I begin with music. Of late I’ve become a huge fan of Monkey Radio.org. I have headphones that block out all outside noise (including the noise of silence). This little trick allows me to start to retreat within my own head.I open the necessary files and programs. IE Explorer, set to Google.com for any info I might need as I write (tonight it was on wind patterns around mountains, tree line information, and blimp speeds). Omni Outliner, a program that allows you to do outlines for any outlining I want. I use TextEdit to write in (think of Windows wordpad, but with no toolbar) with an external word counter plugin. I get my ‘guide file’ with the outline of the current section (I’m on section 2 of 3) of the novel I’m currently working on (it’s very quick overview of what I’m working towards). Another file has the daily writing log and total wordcount, then there’s the current chapter and the previous chapter (sometimes the two previous). I open the oldest chapter and start editing, adding necessary or taking away, tidying up dumb mistakes and taking a second look at the language, murmuring the sentences aloud. That one gets closed. Then onto the new/or latest chapter to add edit it and then add fresh words, occasionally consulting the guide to see what themes or problems I need to keep forefront in my mind as I move forward.As I get ideas for up ahead I stick them into a snippets document with annotation as to where or when they need to be used (past or present).And that is how I’m writing this. I crested the 24K mark. 1000 words over the weekend ain’t bad. The last several weekends I’ve gotten nothing done, so this is a step forward. I’m also finding that the more I write the easier it comes. I struggled to get 300-400 a night when I started. Now when I sit down I’ve been getting that easy, heading towards much higher counts. I’m hoping this continues.Hope you all found this interesting. Ta. -TB

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