Just Showing Up

Next to no writing got done tonight, unless you count e-mails to one of my writing compadres and this blog. A little punctuation and fluctuation on Roothi. Friday looks like a good window unless everyone is off from school because of Hurricane Wilma.

I didn’t even get much reading done.

I’ve got to recommend a chapter to both of you who are reading this, or at least to the one who writes: It’s a chapter called Dare to Suck in a book called Page After Page by Heather Sellers. Derek is my hero. Go read that chapter and then go home and write for a little while.

A Good Day

It was a good day. I finally had the house to myself and I got some good work done on "Roothi." Sent out a story to Fantasy and Science Fiction. Really discovered Maria Mena, great stuff, great soft autumn music. I was on top this afternoon. For the first time I could remember, my body was quiet. Not too full, not too hungry, not too tired, not too hyper, I went to the post office resting back against the driver’s seat, windows open in the perfect day.

If I was hungry for anything, it was something different to read, something nourishing and well-written. I’ve decided to read what I want to read, rather than what I feel I should read and to give a work a few pages of my time and if it doesn’t earn anything more than that, toss it aside and move onto something better. I wanted some good character-driven mainstream fiction. You need to read the crazy stuff to feed your imagination and do something that approaches originality, but you’re not going to transcend the field without looking beyond it. I want to help bring science fiction into the realm of great writing. Many people have already done great work in that area, but as a genre it still has a ways to go. At least in this country.

So I picked up a number of things and read "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" today. I haven’t seen the film, but I’m betting it’s a bit different. I’ll compare notes with my movie-gluttonous wife tomorrow.

I’m hoping to have another go with "Roothi" tomorrow and maybe get her out the door by the weekend, but you never know. I won’t send something if I don’t think it’s ready. Of course, I’m off track for the one-thousand but it’s way too early in the race to sweat. Things are getting better every day.

Little Steps

Alright, it didn’t go so well last night. By the time I pulled my son off of the computer and sent him to bed, I got about a half an hour of writing that I wasn’t crazy about before my wife pulled me away. I’m living for the occasional weekdays that I’m home and nobody else is around. That’s when I’m at my most productive. Whatever I can squeeze in around that, I should be grateful for.

Tonight has been a little better so far. I hit upon a completely different story that I pulled out from the files and it has the potential to be finished and good sooner than "The Purpose of the Machine." This one is called "Roothi’s Reassignment" and I should be able to polish it up within the next few days and have it completed.

I should explain what constitutes a completed story. It’s not just anything with a beginning, middle and an end. To qualify, it has to be a story that I deem ready for submission to a magazine. Now admittedly, some of my first forty-four stories were pretty bad and I realized it eventually. But at one point I thought they were good enough to be published and I sent each of them out at least once. And that’s all it takes.

This blog is accomplishing what it’s supposed to, even if there isn’t a soul that’s reading it. As long as I believe someone might be reading, I feel the obligation to work on my stories and not to be a completely lazy ass. It’s getting me moving a little bit each day. There will be momentum, trust me. You just can’t see it from here.