Back in the Saddle; Writing a Novel

No, I don't ride horses. I'm not really in a saddle. Not unless it's my birthday at Texas Roadhouse.

But I do write, of course. I'm here to start sharing my life a little more in the hopes that I had when I wanted to start journaling: responsibility and discipline. I thought journaling would ensure some sort of record and keep me stable in the things I want to accomplish. But self-discipline is hard, so here I am sharing it with readers, whomever reads this.

I'm already several thousand words in, but part of the problem recently—ever since Spring Break really—I have been slacking. Today I am supposed to be on 34,000 words. I started the writing process thirty four days ago; 1,000 words a day. But things have felt overwhelming.

So I will have to catch up among the other things I am doing: work, school, bowling, a suddenly more active youth group at my church, and studying chess. And as the semester draws to a close it seems to be getting harder. Normally the Spring begins difficult and ends with some sort of airplane lateral landing, but this Spring semester feels like I was forced onto a rollercoaster that started out very chill, and now we are climbing up to the big drop. Like the Shreika—I think it is called—at Tampa Busch Gardens.

This is only the first draft of an old idea: A boy and a girl are in love but something tragic happens and now she is trying to find the boy. But it is a scifi setting, distant future multiplanetary society. I wouldn't want to give too much away yet as it is difficult to explain without a lot of time and possibly too detailed of an explaination to the novel's inner workings.

I'll have to write a couple thousand words a day. I'm following an outline I created so I'm not generating the content purely up front, but a lot of the idea does have to be generated as I can only use around 25 words of the outline per 1,000 words in the novel. I had to do this before; I got behind a few days before Spring Break and caught up during Spring Break. It will take longer to get back on track, but it will be worth it in the end. The plan is to write 100K words. It will likely be too much, but the best steaks are the ones where you cut the fat away yet leave all the fatty flavor.

As well as keeping up with Writing on this blog, I will begin posting some updates on bowling, chess, and also poems I think are notable to look at or some that I am proud of, being in a poem technique class this semester. Maybe I'll throw a couple pictures in every now and then to spice the visuals up.