Crossed yourself to ward off contagion?

Crossed yourself to ward off contagion?

Nope - I doubt individual writing issues are contagious. More as a "there is more, Horatio, than can be blah blahed in your philosophy" reaction (how in hell do I forget Hamlet???). Complete "whooosh" of warm air as something totally beyond me went by my ear.

I would NEVER delete my first draft on purpose...It's happened on accident and the originals still haunt me because I was not able to reconstruct them completely. Failure to care enough about my own stuff enough to back it up, I'd say. I've had several blocked times, but am starting to get serious about writing every day now. Some of it's good, some of it's practice.

And now I am going to step away from the Buffistas and actually write. You know, the painful stuff.

Laters...

Heh. Betsy, I did that this morning (Matty Groves, not Needfire; the stuff they pay me for).

And me out to play in the sunshine.

I'm fried from housework today, and am going to see Reggie Gibson read poetry tonight, so I'm going to be burning midnight oil on the writing front. That's OK. I write best at night, anyway.

That's a whole 'nother thing, isn't it? When people prefer to write?

Victor, from about 1986 until last year, I used to do all, and I do mean all, my writing between 6 and 9 am (yes, morning person, that's life). I literally couldn't write any other time: phones ringing/real world during the day, too fried at night.

Now? Pretty much any time.

Age, it has its consolations....

I'm another early morning writer. Evening is when I tend to go back and tinker with what I've written, but sometimes I'll get into first-draft mode shortly before sleep claims me, and I can add a page or so to my total.

It's fascinating to read how other people work. I'm still trying to finish my first novel, and learning as I go along. So far, I've concluded that I hate outlining, though I keep a running name list and character bible. Also, I write out of order. I'll plug away at a key part of the midsection for weeks, then get bored or blocked and have a go at the epilogue for awhile.

And I'm starting to adopt "What Would Joss Do?" as a writing mantra, because I'm always tempted to be too nice to my characters. For instance, I knew my hero and heroine needed to have a confrontation about the fact that when she married him, she was in love with someone else. Originally, I was going to have this come a few weeks after the wedding, after they've had some good sex and interesting conversations and she's actually realized the other guy was just a silly schoolgirl crush of hers. But then I thought "WWJD" and changed the fight to the day before the wedding, just to make the stakes a little higher for our sweet little virginal heroine.

It's still basically a sunshiny romantic comedy, and that's exactly what I want it to be, but upping the conflict definitely improves it. But then I told some of my writing group classmates about the heroine of the fantasy novel that's on my mind's backburner. She's a murderer. She feels guilty about it, but it was a sacrifice she had to make lest her magical gifts fall under the power of her family's enemies. When I told the tale, with a little more elaboration on how and why she went about the crime, one of the listeners said, "That's so TWISTED." I smiled and thought, "Joss would be so proud."

Twisted. It's a good thing.