New New Year

Posting about: Current writing habits / 101 Things writing goals / Writing database

Writing has been sporadic to say the least. The usual journal-ish bits, spurts here and there, odd lines I come up with or ideas for ideas, but nothing structured, and no structured working pattern. I’m not sure any of that is necessarily bad, though. I seem to need to not do things properly for a little while to remind myself how much I want to do them. Similar to my mentality re. fitness and nutrition: if I miss something, I scramble to get it back. Absence/heart proverb etc.

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101 THINGS

I signed up to 101 Things in 1001 Days and these are the goals I have down under ‘writing’:
007) Write a complete first draft for Script Frenzy 2009
008) Write a complete first draft for Nanowrimo 2009
009) Write 101 pieces of short fiction and/or vignettes (000/101)
010) Do Poster Poems every week for a month (0/4)
011) Turn a bit of family history/memory into fiction
012) Journal every day for a month
013) Take part in a writing festival
014) Submit a piece of writing for publication/production
015) Leave a couple of lines of poetry lying around in public every day for a week (0/7)
016) Put together my writing database

+ 007 is exciting and do-able. Thinking I might do a stage play, completely free myself from all the distractions, (i.e. desire to direct the thing Right Now,) that come with writing for screen-type things.

On the couch in the front room

THE BLOCK [novel]
This started as my attempt at NaNoWriMo 2007, and I got the 50,000 words done, but didn’t finish the story. Ultimately it’s a big mess of multiple plots and cringe-makingly clumsy prose that has no real focus and a trillion loose ends. It also has some sections and characters and ideas that I love. Reading it over I’ve discovered a few things:
a) I was trying to do too much at once. Thriller meets Lit Fic meets Coming-of-Age Cheese meets Rom Com meets A Great Big Mess. First step is to decide which stories work best together and put everything else on the proverbial clipboard because otherwise I won’t do anything justice.
b) I can come up with some nice little phrases when I want to, engaging characters, decent twists. This is both satisfying and reassuring. I reckon it’s generally a good idea to be not completely talentless. In fact I think that’ll be my mantra. “I’m not completely talentless.”
c) I reap the rewards of hard work, but also, just maybe, hard work on this whole thing is its own reward.

SECTIONS [prose poems]
The first things to get cut from ‘The Block’, which frees both projects up to be what they need to be.

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OH, AND…
I love movies. I love them. I love cinema. I love film. I love movies.

Musings

I talked to my brother tonight when I got home and suddenly I was a person again.

Typing is not natural to me – in writing, that is – but it’s faster, so less is lost, but there’s a barrier. And the backspace key. (Soon to be the ‘delete’ key, once I have my Mac.)

EMBASSY [screenplay]
Haven’t mentioned this yet, huh? Started life as my attempt at Script Frenzy 2007 and was then lost in the great computer crash of that same year. I still like the basic set-up, the protagonist, the themes etc., but the intricacies of the plot are nowhere. I know what I want to see but it doesn’t make sense yet. It’s high concept and dystopian future. In fact who am I kidding, I’m basically writing Children of Men, only not that subject matter. Hmm.

THE CENTRE [screen drama]