satyapriya

Every single darned time I decide that the following morning is the morning to Change Up My Bad Facebook Habit and Do The Things Instead, I find that by mid-afternoon, I have fallen into the fb quagmire.
I did wake at 6.30am, and do my morning pages first thing before I succumbed to a brief fb thing, and I did get a sizeable walk in by 9am. Did the length and back of Bellbird Dell, so a couple of km I guess. Met a pug who, on the slightest whim, wriggles down, belly to the ground. His owner calls it Splat Dog. She has to wait until he gets up again of his own accord. Which can be some time.
I got back in time to bring a pertinent email to PizzaBoy's attention, and then it was off to Coburg for my annual Capricorn lunch with MotorCycleMan, with added PizzaBoy this year. All three of us Capricorns: 4th, 9th, and 11th January.
Halfway home in the car, and I was ready for a big long sleep.
I settled onto the couch at home, read a little, and then napped on and off. I blame the hot humid weather. Also, not feeling 100%.
Awake 4.30pm, and I started stuffing around on facebook. I knew that I wanted to get in a bit of writing today - actual writing, not just morning pages, or rambling on here. Would I open up my computer and do it? No, I would not. I found myself flipping between the collection of short stories on my kindle app, fb, and - get this - googling for writing motivation podcasts.
It took me until 6.30pm to crack open this computer, and write 548 words of a new short story, one that's been noodling around in my skull for the past week. I was waiting for the perfect opening line, and realising it wasn't going to happen, I decided to just start anyway. So, set up done, and yes, it's as predictable as all get out. You know right from the start where it's going. I'm hoping the fun to be had in the meantime will be worth it for readers. After all, a reader only has to see the words 'her hand was strangely cold' to think 'vampire' these days. It's never just anemia or poor circulation.
I'm not writing vampires. But a close cousin in terms of genre.
Showed the results to PB.
"You know where it's going?" I asked.
"Oh yes," he said, happily.
Even if he is paid the big money to like everything I write, I am heartened enough to keep going, just not tonight.
I do want to do a bit more on CD GENIE, too, but have no idea where the story goes next, apart from the gnome/dwarf/brownie being very cross indeed. But, not tonight. This humidity is addling me, and I can feel pleased that I've done 500 words.
Tomorrow morning, TwentiesPerson and I have an 8am date to go swimming, so that will be my exercise for the day done, before I head off for a Magnificent Women Networking luncheon in Templestowe.
I wish I wasn't gluten intolerant (thanks, Peru, and your awful parasites). I could totally go a delicious white bread sandwich tonight. Fresh, soft white bread, softened butter, maybe egg and lettuce. Oh gods, yes!

Around about 2001, I wrote 3 short novels for girls aged around 8-9. TwentiesGirl was that age, and she had a bunch of friends, all of whom were looking for books with female protagonists. This is long before the A Mighty Girl website, where mothers of girls can track down girl-positive books and toys, costumes, and everything else Mighty Girl.
So, I wrote 3 short books, around 10,000 words each. Fairly gentle fantasy stuff.

Being an integration aide in a Grade 5-6 classroom, and being exposed to what 10-11 year old girls were reading was a revelation. They were much more sophisticated readers than the culture of hearing impaired students I was used to indicated. I had suspected, but not really taken in that often deaf kids lag behind in reading because they have a hard time 'reading between the lines', and getting interested in books that no longer have pictures as clues. This doesn't mean all deaf kids. Just my general experience of about 5-8 girls, and a few boys.

I forgot about the books until late last year, when SciFaiku Woman reminded me. "Whatever happened to those books?"
So I dragged them out, resolved to rewrite, update, and get them into the ebook world.
And I've been dragging my arse ever since, thinking the books are gormless, condescending, overwritten, terribly earnest, and just generally the sort of 'here are lessons on behaviour that young people need to learn' educational tone that I loathe in children's and YA work.

I've also been holding off, because I have always been a pantser writer, just seeing where the idea takes me. Works for short stories, poems, 1000 word articles. These have been my mainstay. Works for pantsed NaNoWriMo novels, of which I have 5 in first draft disaster mode.
But, to create a longer work over which I have some amount of control, and it's not all found objects, and filler, then I need a plan. I want to plan and then not bore myself during the writing, because I've already told the story in the plan.
To that end, I'm going to Brisbane in a couple of weeks, to the Kim Wilkins seminar on planning.
Sure I've read books on planning a novel. They bore me, and I never get anything from them.

But, in desperate need to write something, anything, I'm gonna dick about with CD GENIE. And I'm going to do it here. Disregarding everything about writing for 'young people', and how the original story went, I'm gonna fuck the story around. Rereading the original, I created such a vile older brother that I'm surprised anyone liked him at all. I created a mother so benignly neglectful that it borders on abuse. I ignored the fact that teenagers cannot adopt a dog from the RSPCA. Random trips to a local trash and treasure market. Vague, veiled references to an ex who I'd rather see under a bus than immortalised in any of my books. Unless I have him run over by a bus...
Anyway, I'm gonna play about with the book here on my blog, much as snakypoet did with her memoir posts on her blog. Who knows if it will ever see light of day as an ebook? Who cares? Who cares if it's the 'real version of the book'?
This is just me giving myself permission to run wild, run free, write whatever, just for the sake of writing, to reassure myself that I can still do this shit, in some form or other.
All that self-doubt and angst from the previous post is still there. You betcha.
Nevertheless, she persisted, because it's already a hot day, and if I don't try this, I'll spend yet another day reading, napping, and fretting.