Great Beginnings

What a great morning so far! I'm trying to incorporate my creative writing into my blogging time. The purpose of blogging in part has been to get me to loosen up on the editing part of my brain and get used to just letting the words hum. So when I blog I just let it pour out, mis-spelled words and all, post and be gone. It's taken awhile to get comfortable doing that. But I am now. So the trick has been to do the same thing with the fiction writing. And it's slowly been happening. I've been writing long hand in notebooks, which is somewhat freeing but not very practical because I can't write fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. I type much faster. One advantage of writing long hand was that it allowed me to see just how much editing I do in the first draft pre-writing stage, words scribbled out everywhere, new words scribbled in, just a mess to try and decipher really. And I shouldn't be editing when I'm writing, I should be writing. Editing can come later.

Blogging is helping me to turn the editor off and turn the writer on. This morning I took out a story I've been working on and I wrote a half page. It's a half page of pre-writing where basically I just figured out where this guy is coming from, what his name is, and who the main characters are in his life. It's straight-forward unedited narrative. At the beginning a note to myself to go back and show this part and how to do that most effectively. It will end up being a couple of pages at least. But for me, just the fact that I didn't go for those perfect couple of pages in the first sitting is a HUGE leap. Huge. This is progress. And I'm loving this story, these characters. It's kinda quirky, but fun. It seems like I have stories and characters coming out of the woodwork and tapping me on the shoulder all the time now saying, "Pay attention to me! Pick me now!" This is good.

Mood: glowing
Drinking: coffee, cream no sugar
Listening To: my fingers flying across the keyboard
Hair: untamed and tangled