Short Story Project: Update 2

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
-Oscar Wilde

 

I’ve just finished editing/rewriting the first five stories in The Humanity Project.  I’m almost at 16,000 words!   Now on to the next five.

At this point I’m crossing my fingers and hoping to be done writing by the end of the month, then it’s off to a few people for beta-reading.  Then back again to me for further editing, and then… *drumroll*  And then I’m going to self-publish it. 

Of course life is still a thing.  On Sunday my amazing fiancé comes to visit me for three weeks and then we are flying back to Oregon where I will be (hopefully) working.  Also there’s the Tuscany Press story contest, which I entered into last year and again this year.  One of my stories in The Humanity Project has been entered into the contest, if it wins then I will need to take it out of the project and write one new story. 

Anywho so that’s what’s new with me. 🙂

Pushing Through

Can’t we just pretend today is Monday?  Yeah, let’s do that.  Pretend it’s Monday and this post is exactly on time. 

As writers I feel like are a few things everyone of us has heard at least once from other writers. Stuff like: “Just let your characters talk to you and lead the way.” Or: “There’s no such thing as writer’s block”  (That’s a lie.)    But the one I’m going to talk about today is the: “When you get writer’s block you just need to push through.”  They tell you to do something like write a paragraph each day, doesn’t matter what the paragraph is about, just do it. 

I always felt like this was good advice, it made sense.  But it wasn’t something I really did.  I mean when you’re stuck, you’re stuck.  For me I get slightly depressed and upset, because I have all of these words in my head, but I can’t get them out.  Sometimes I’ll just sit staring at my notebook or google drive document and try to will the words out of my head to my fingertips.  Needless to say that hardly ever works. 

So I’m here to say that when you’re stuck, sitting down and forcing yourself to write one small, tiny, rambling, insignificant paragraph works.  I’ve been working on doing this exercise every day this last week.  Paragraph in the journal complaining about not seeing my fiancé, paragraph in my notebook about my plans for “The Humanity Project.”  Doesn’t matter what it is, I just write it.  It works because it unclogs the words inside and starts to give them vent.  Once I’ve opened up door, most of the time everything else falls into place. So try it! 

 

In case you were wondering, yes that is what this post is.  This is my daily unclogging of words and ideas.  See y’all later I need to do some much editing.  😉

 

Proud of Me and The Name Change

This is just another small happy post.   I passed 10,00 words last night and finished the third story titled: “The Circus Manager”.   These were the two goals I had to make by at least Monday, and I finished early.    Hooray for me!

The other thing I was going to just quickly pop in to say was I’ve changed the name of the short story project from “Those Things Called Humans” to “The Humanity Project.”  Like the last title this one is still the tentative name, but I like this one more than the first one.

 

Thanks for reading!

Of Imogen Heap, Happy Creativity and Writing Exercises

Yeah so first off, my very favorite musical artist Imogen Heap is putting out a new album and I am so freaking excited about it that I wanted to post about it.  🙂  If you’ve never heard her you must, she’s amazing.  Here are some of my favorite songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afbvd8g5hMU  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0lCL2hpRPM  and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXj0dF7LAyE

Next I guess, I just wanted to say that I got a lot of writing done yesterday and it also made me happy.  I’ve reached 7,500 words on my short story project and I’m about half way done with the third story.   By Monday I would like to reach 10,000, finish this story and finish a fourth as well.

And then last more about writing!  So I woke up early this morning and went for a walk down the road, along the way I ended up seeing these flowers peeking through the grass on the other side of the road.  I sat down and started to just describe everything I saw right in front of me.   At the end it gave me an idea. And basically I’m writing a bunch of writing exercises for myself.   We’ll see how this goes, but I think it could turn out really interesting.
Alright…Happy ramble over, continue with your day.

🙂

Short Story Project: Update 1

So it’s been about three weeks since I first mentioned my short story project, tentatively named “Those Things Called Humans”.   Quite honestly things have been going really slowly.  I’ve edited two stories and added them to my document, started completely writing another story and then started a fourth.  But this isn’t going to be a post complaining, or making excuses, its going to be an introduce everyone to my stories post!   I know that sounds super exciting, but it’s really not going to be that amazing. I’m really just giving you a one sentence summary and a paragraph of a snippet.  My wordcount for this project is now 6,105.

First story in my book is “The Boy”.  The story is about a twelve year old boy who is the sole provider for his family during the depression.

Click. The boy turned off his lamp and crawled into bed with his four year old brother. The boy had been reading or escaping as he called it. Because the world was too deathly real for him; if he read, he could pull his eyes away from the ribs of his brother as his chest rose and fell in agonizing gasps. If he could read, he could forget the dull look in the eyes of his mother, who had no more tears to cry. if he could read, he could leave behind responsibility and worries and money counting and the adult world.  If he could read he could live a life in which people lived happily ever after.

 

Second story is titled “A List of Regrets”.   This story is about a girl right before she commits suicide.

Regret I: I Am A Coward

The water gushed from the tap into the white, clean, new tub.  My friend’s tub.  The water was hot.  My fingers were starting to burn but still I held them under the water, mesmerized. At least if I’m going to do this, it’s going to be warm water. That made me smile a little.  I’m such a coward. Peeling off my layers of clothes I checked the clock. 5 am.  Three hours till Derrick would get home. I wanted to look at myself one last time before I did it. I’m not sure why.  Maybe I had one small hope left in me, the hope that I wasn’t such a coward. Women spend so much of their life worrying if they have ‘’the perfect body’’, or if they are ‘’sexy enough”.  I never had to worry about that.  I embodied the word sex.  The hips, the legs, the breasts, the boys loved them. Three years ago at sixteen that meant the world to me.

 

So there you go! Monday’s mandatory post is done.   I hope you enjoyed.

Gearing up for Nano

Already?  No, okay. Maybe not.  I’m just super excited!!  For those of you who don’t know what Nano is, it stands for Nanowrimo or National Novel Writing Month.   It an annual contest in November when people all over the world compete in writing 50,000 words of a single novel.

I first stated doing this when I was 13 and I’ve done it every year since then.   There are many reasons that I love Nanowrimo.  One of them is of course that it really motivates me to get a little bit of writing done every day for a month.  I usually come out with 1/2 of a novel.  The community is also really awesome. There are forums for everything.  Need a character name? You can ask.  Need advice on how an 18th century kitchen in Russia might look like? Ask and someone will usually answer.   There is also of course a lot of procrastination that goes on in the forums, but it all part of the fun. 😉   Besides it’s a good way to make friends and start a friendly word war.

In short…I love Nanowrimo!  November is my favorite time of year.