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Jun. 10th, 2007 @ 09:18 pm
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Somewhere along the way I either:
a) forgot how to write effectively, or...
b) woke up to the realization I was never able to write to begin with.
Either way, the result is the same.Present Soundtrack: Massive Attack :: Mezzanine |
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May. 7th, 2007 @ 10:18 am
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As I near the end of my latest pleasure read, and as I'm two weeks into my hiatus from working on the novel, the past forty-eight hours have been filled with a lot of consideration of authorship, and the prospect of a new project, or, really, just writing something not to do with James, because James is breaking my heart. (It's unintentional, I forgive him.)
So I decided this morning to begin writing a little bit every day. All in one Word document, headed by the date, the time at which I began, and to what music I was listening, then footnoted with the stop time and a couple dashes to segue to the next day.
The first sadness was that I've written so little as of late that Microsoft Word was gone from my Start Menu's catalogue of most used programs. But once the software was open and the blank page stared me back - the first blank page I've seen in a long time - I wrote for sixteen minutes. It doesn't matter what I write, and it won't matter if tomorrow what I write has anything to do with what I wrote today, or the day after that, only that I write. Exorcise those particular demons. The words untold. No matter how unfitting they are, how dirty or neat, how responsible or bratty, how melodic or caustic. I realized a while back that I could live the rest of my life perfectly content if I were never again published. I don't even possess the desire to market those manuscripts I have completed and of which I remain proud. Just that they're written, and exist, and are whole outside of me. I don't expect the novel to be any different whenever I do finish it. I just need it to exist.
But I still need that existence to be the nearest thing to perfection of which I'm capable.Present Soundtrack: Des_Ark :: Loose Lips Sink Ships |
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I believe my struggle with the novel manuscript is fairly well documented. But it's probably not fair to generalize it so and pretend the whole damnable thing is giving me fits, it's mostly localized to a pivot point in the novel around the 20,000 word mark. Which hurts everything thereafter. It has existed in several different forms to this point. For awhile the changes I made were minor and didn't necessarily so much effect the events that were to follow and my ability to push forward, but then because I still couldn't quite get it to work (for me), I made a significant shift there at the 20k road sign, which made most of what I'd written past that point moot. But still that didn't solve the issue I was having. And finally, this weekend, I felt like I realized the reason why.
It has also been fairly well documented that this novel manuscript is the most personal of things I've ever written, as much of the lead character's emotions and motives are a metaphorical look at my own, and while yes, there's always a part of us in our characters and our stories, this one is pretty blatant.
In the novel, James becomes interested - perhaps obsessed - with the notion of things being buried and hidden on account of something he witnesses his wife doing that has a great emotional effect on both he and her. At the 20k word mark he, a lobster trapper by trade, dives off his boat and tows himself into the dark, mid-winter depths. It is from here everything becomes complicated. And it didn't occur to me until this weekend that maybe the reason why is I haven't come up out of the water yet, and that it's impossible for me as an author to get ahead of myself in this sort of metaphorical autobiography I'm writing. And that I probably won't be able to move successfully past this mark in the novel until I come up out of the water in my own life and can then mirror appropriately in the manuscript.
So, with that in mind, I've decided to put the novel on the back burner for awhile. Any time I think I'm ready to try again, I'll pull it out and give it a go, but I won't beat myself up each time it doesn't work, such as it hasn't the past half dozen times. I understand now. And it won't work until I've re-emerged in my own life, and the fact is I might not realize I have until I try to write it and find it suddenly to work. Until then, I'll continue to wait, and finally try working on some other projects for a change, something I have not done since December 2005.Present Soundtrack: Bloc Party :: A Weekend in the City |
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Apr. 16th, 2007 @ 06:10 pm
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After making no headway on the novel in over a week - not so much as an attempt since that evening at the bar about a week and a half ago in which a fellow pissed with my flow - I decided not to let an unexpected day off with nothing to do (I wasn't supposed to return from St. Augustine until today but we came home a day early) pass without cause and lugged the Heaviest Laptop on the Planet down to First Street. Pushed through "that scene" and the beginning of the new scene following it for about the length of the laptop's battery life. The progress wasn't monumental, I didn't walk out wanting to piston my fists in the air, but I didn't feel badly about it either. I still think it's going to be another two full years before this thing's through at this rate, but somehow that seems okay. I'm in no hurry to get it done, which is also good, because I won't make rash and ridiculous decisions just to move forward that I'll later be either a) too lazy to backtrack and change or b) have painted myself into such a corner that I'll have to delete a third of the manuscript in order to remove the cancer.
One thing I've realized just in the past few days is that: as important as my writing is to me, and as crucial as it is to the wholeness of my soul to write whenever I can, and to one day complete this particular manuscript which has become a part of me, it is not the source of my sadness. I thought for awhile it was this manuscript dragging on, especially since this novel is so personal to me and I thought maybe I was leaving my spirit lingering here in this space, where James is lingering in the novel, and that was part of my problem, but I don't think that's it at all, as real as it may be that when the novel doesn't go well it brings me down, or working on certain scenes can sometimes drain me until I feel overbearingly sad for a day or two. It has a little bit to do with my day job, a little bit to do with my home life, a little bit to do with my love life (though not as much as I may pretend), and a little bit to do with something else I used to fill a lot of my time with I'd taken a break from. And as necessary as I think that break was, and as healthy as it was, I think maybe it's time to get back. I could easily walk away from it all, call it quits, and no one would try to talk me out of it, but I think part of my problem has been a certain sort of longing. A hole where once that lay. So it's time to get it back. And while I don't expect it to solve my problem over the past few weeks, I expect it to help considerably.Present Soundtrack: Mnemic :: The Audio Injected Soul |
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It's happening too often to be only a coincidence. Each day after a writing session, even if that writing session doesn't perhaps go so well (and perhaps aggravated if it, in fact, does not), I wake up exhausted, weak, as if I've done some great activity the day prior and it's left me depleted. It drains me completely. This was not the case in the past. Only with this novel. It is taking something very real out of me.Present Soundtrack: In This Moment :: Beautiful Tragedy |
| » Another Example of Why the Novel Cannot Move Forward |
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I have been at my current job since a year ago Sunday April 1st. For 90% of that time, I have been closing most every night. It was only recently, within the past six weeks, I began requesting one opening shift per week, as it was the days I got off at six that I found myself more interested in writing, and I'd come to the rather belated realization that my novel was not going to progress anywhere if I didn't give it more undivided attention.
Knowing that today was my weekly morning shift, with the added knowledge that I hadn't so much as attempted to write since last Thursday - which didn't go well - and that I'd decided to make a significant change right at the major pivot point twenty-thousand words in, I was looking forward to getting off this evening and going not so far up the street to First Street Draught House, my new favorite bar, to crank up my laptop and do some writing to the tune of a couple Blue Moons.
Anyone who knows me very well can probably draw their own conclusion that I must have music to write. It's a prerequisite, and asking me to write without it is like asking me to eat without food. I tilt my head as a bird attempting to understand human language and stare.
Unfortunately, when I arrived at the bar, I plugged my earphones into my iPod and prepared to turn on something melancholic and lush, and instead saw the Apple insignia blare onto the screen for a bare second before it shut back off. The battery was dead. I had awful flashbacks of co-workers fiddling with it at work, knowing that I'd arrived that morning with still half a battery's life, knowing someone had accidentally pushed play and not turned it back off and that it had systematically drained itself over the course of the day to leave me here with nothing.
But there was nothing I could do about that now. I was left with no music and instead only the din of the bar. The bar that was much more crowded than usual for a weekday afternoon at 6:30. Almost every seat in the house taken, loud conversation, ruckus laughter (obviously some of them had been there for awhile), Masters on the television, no audio, nothing even playing on the jukebox, nothing aurally but for the distractions of every conversation around me. Still, I put in my earphones as if they were producing something for me to hear, tuned into a spot in the novel about three pages ahead of where I needed to attack, and worked my way into a rhythm before hitting "the spot."
The longer I go on the more I'm able to shut out all that around me, ignore the two guys to my right ignoring the girl they're with, the conversation she's trying to have, while a young couple to my left seem uncomfortable and like they want to be alone in a dark restaurant but find themselves in a loud, crowded bar instead. And then I hit the spot that needs the change, where everything from there on is to shift, and just as I hit it, literally only a couple sentences into the alterations, a gentleman takes his seat next to me, leaning into my personal space, and when I glance at him after he's ordered his first beer I see his eyes fixated on my screen.
I laugh because it's all I know to do, and because I'm hoping he'll look away and ignore what I'm doing when he realizes I've seen him doing it, but instead he says to me, "I assume that's what you want if you bring it here to work on."
I ignore him, I just want to attack this scene, break through the barrier that's been holding me back, take it beyond where I've been able to this point, finally have a breakthrough so that I can move into the next stage of the manuscript, but he's not going to let it end there, and besides, my mind has been bumped off the tracks and it's going to require backtracking and hoping I can get back into the rhythm of the novel.
He says then, "It's more interesting than the golf I'm watching."
"I doubt that," I say, I can't imagine any other response, and he says to me, "You were meant to take that as an insult, not as a compliment. Golf? Interesting?"
And with that I was through. Downed the rest of my beer. Paid my tab. And left, even as he was moving a seat down with the exodus of the young couple previously to his left and he patting the seat he had been occupying, saying to me, "Leaving room for a young woman to come sit beside you and be your muse."
And my friends wonder why I've begun to drink more, and more, and more...
Apr. 5th, 2007 @ 10:07 pm
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Well, that was a fruitless endeavor.
Mar. 29th, 2007 @ 04:06 pm
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| » Publication / Novel |
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Apparently the new issue of Space & Time Magazine is shipping, wherein lies my story "182's Offspring." Since taking a hiatus from marketing any of my work, this is the first thing I've had appear in print in a very long time, perhaps over a year, so it caught me by surprise to hear it was shipping. I've gotten into a habit of only checking my mail once or twice a week but I'll definitely swing by on my way to work to see if my copy's arrived. I hope they didn't bend the hell out of it fitting it into my box.
In what I feel is more important news, I went straight from work yesterday to First Street to return to work on the novel since it's been going so smoothly as of late and I wanted to continue cashing in while it was there to be had. Time flew by, words flew by, and before I knew it I'd been there for nearly two hours and I'd managed to work my way up through the first 20,000 words of the manuscript. (I've been reading and revising and tightening from word one on up through because there's a pivot point right at the 20k mark, and I've been continually changing just what happens after that point, and I felt the need to establish one concrete story line leading up to that point in hopes that when I again reached it, working ever forward toward it, I could blast through and keep moving ahead without all this indecision and confusion and bafflement and self-argument. We'll find out soon whether or not it worked.) I work a long shift today and won't be going out to continue work on the manuscript when I get off at 9:15 tonight, and I'm going out of town on Thursday to attend to something that should erase one of the regrets I've had from life, but I'm leaving early in hopes of finding somewhere to write there before the plans that evening. For the first time, I think, I'm feeling happy about this manuscript and where it stands (and how it reads) instead of feeling only like its emotional slave.
Mar. 27th, 2007 @ 09:12 am
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Was meeting a friend for a couple drinks before heading over to the movie theatre to watch on the big screen a video her husband had put together for her birthday, and I decided early on in the day I would get to the bar early and do some work on the novel for an hour and a half or so before she got there. I immediately returned to attacking the section I had tried to work on last night and had been slapped in the face by, but this time was successful in taming it, feeling in control of it, and making the necessary adjustments. If I can finally pull together everything I've written so far into one cohesive, forward-moving story line then I can get back to actual writing and not all this reading and re-reading and trying to figure things out, and I'm about 13,000 words up through it now, so I'm getting there.
But it does further establish my belief that I have to get out of my home in order to make any successful progress... on pretty much any writing project. Plenty of this novel was written at home, I can't pretend it wasn't, but almost any time I make myself go out and concentrate solely on the manuscript for awhile, somewhere where I won't just stop in ten minutes and go do something else such as I can do at home, I make good progress. Whereas I'll make good progress at home maybe once a month. And for a good part of the summer not even that. I'm promising myself I'll begin going out to work on it at least twice a week (instead of the current one), but I hope to turn that into three or four times per week. I need this very heavy weight off my back. It's too personal, too emotional, I need out of it, for it to be over, so that I can move on. I think sometimes that it's keeping me tethered to the emotions that spawned it to begin with. And I've been burdened by those feelings for far too long. It's really, seriously time to move on, I know that as well as anyone, but there's this anchor keeping me tight to the sea floor...
Mar. 26th, 2007 @ 12:30 am
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I blame the novel for being troublesome and slow-moving, but it's just as much my fault for not more often sitting down, looking at it, and at least attempting to make progress. Essentially only once per week, my one weekday off, in which I'll go out to specifically give it my undivided attention for a couple hours in a bar where I cannot be distracted by other gadgetries.
Whether it's a fire for the manuscript I didn't know previously or whether I'm just buckling down, I realize I need to tend to it far more often. I tried going out on the deck last night on what was a beautiful night, poured myself a glass of brandy, sat there and saw distant street lights through the trees that looked mysteriously like the deck lights of ships out on the ocean, but I could not write, and so I packed it in after no time at all and returned inside for some listening of music and eventual sleep.
However, I felt the bite this morning while doing my morning reading. But not on the novel. To return to two paragraphs I had written back about two or three weeks ago after watching The Illusionist, the only non-novel writing I had done since I began it in Dec. '05. Returned to it, added to it, felt it, and although I only wrote on it for about fifteen minutes, adding only about 300 words, it was undeniably something completely separate from the novel, not even in the same time line, and it gives me a parallel attention, something else I can focus on if I'm not feeling the novel, which I suspect has been one of my problems, having only this one outlet and if not in the mindset for that then having nothing.
And just writing this post it feels unorganized and like light breaking apart through a prism, shooting off in every direction but straight ahead, but at least I understand myself.
Mar. 25th, 2007 @ 10:20 am
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My one weekday off per week and I used it, as usual, to report to First Street Draught House about 2:30 PM for a little work on the novel. Whereas I usually only take my journal to write by hand, much of which never makes it into the actual typewritten manuscript but is more an exercise in working out the character, his thought processes, how he reacts to certain situations, etc., today I decided to take my laptop with the novel manuscript such as it stands now and work on revising it until such a time as I felt like pushing it forward.
And things were going very well for about half an hour -- a Blue Moon to my right and James-inspired tracks playing on shuffle on my MP3 player with a beautiful bartendress to glimpse on occasion when I needed to look up for inspiration as to James's plight, until my laptop battery crapped out, losing unsaved the progress I'd made. Which, granted, you can only do so much in half an hour, and I wasn't writing from scratch entire scenes, it was only revisions with little sentences and paragraphs added in here and there, but I was in the proper mindset, which only happens so often, so it still felt like an unfortunate loss, but it fits 2007 pretty well.
Moved the laptop to the side, began writing by hand in the journal instead, and put down on paper part of a scene that will likely make it into the novel further than I've actually written so far, so I can't say all is lost, movement was made. Giving serious consideration to going back out later this evening to a bar closer to home (River Birch, most likely) to do some more work, or more like to just cover up what I lost this afternoon.
In the meantime, I've promised our company's IT guru a music mix, and it's time to set forth to working upon it.
Mar. 22nd, 2007 @ 05:40 pm
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| » The Website is Complete |
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It sat untended for about a year's time, but the website has now been redesigned, relocated, and reposted for anyone who may trip upon it.
blindside.net/JonathanWilliamHodges
I've stripped it down to what amounts to the bare essentials, and probably even the biography is a little superfluous, but such is the effect of wavering between feeling like I have something to say or nothing to say at all.
Besides the usual (bibliography, biography, etc.), the only unique feature to the website you may find interesting is I've taken the old Project Pulp Radio, now moot, and turned it into JWH Radio and posted it on this website. It's something I'll update every so often with songs from artists/albums with which I'm obsessed at the time. The inaugural playlist is now up and ready for your streaming pleasure, if you're so inclined, by clicking on the link at the bottom of any of the pages there "listen with JWH." It'll pop-up in a cute little window all its own, and you need only click on the first track (or whichever track you want to hear) in order to start it. Right now it's made up of the artists: Midlake, The Black Heart Procession, DJ Shadow, Ride, Ratatat, The Fire Theft, The Receiver, Bloodjinn, Ayreon, 31Knots, Amon Tobin, and Omnium Gatherum.
The main reason I felt the need to get my website back up and in order is because of my continued - albeit leisurely - progress on the novel, and I wanted a sounding board for that, I suppose, some sort of foundation. I will probably update this journal more often for that same reason, and because the website links to it.
So check it out if you're curious.
Mar. 18th, 2007 @ 10:16 am
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As per usual on my one weekday off per week since I began getting every Sunday off (at least for now, until a co-worker who has taken over such duties moves away this spring or summer), I took my notebook down to First Street Draught House around two o'clock and attempted to write to the tune of two Blue Moons. Writing can be unpredictable, every time you sit down to write you're in a slightly different place or mood, and sometimes it's a good place for creativity, especially for whatever topic you're attempting to address in your project, or sometimes it's not. Sometimes it doesn't necessarily seem to be either, but if it's not conducive to it, it may as well be bad. Today was such a day. Thought about the novel all morning, what I wanted to work on in my afternoon writing, and while I did indeed churn out a few handwritten pages, and got out mostly what it was I wanted to say, I knew as I was writing that it was just going through the motions, the product I was churning out was nothing of which to be proud, and I would eventually need to either edit it heavily or just re-write it when the mood struck again.
I've worked myself into not necessarily a good habit of only writing on these weekly ventures and leaving whatever I produce there in my notebook, never importing it into the novel on my computer. The distractions at home have been too great, and not necessarily in a negative way, but there's always something to do, aggravated by the fact I don't get home from work until 9:30 pm four days out of five, which, by the time I unpack my things, prepare, and eat dinner, it's 10:30 and I'm just wanting to relax with some music or a movie for a few minutes before I go to bed and start it back up the next day. Given my schedule, the most opportune time for me to write would be in the mornings before going in to work but that's never been a very good time for me mentally, it just doesn't fit what I'm trying to do. I'm an evening/night writer, or at least somewhere dark (thus the bar). Maybe if I could find a cool, atmospheric coffee house in town not so far from the house I could visit a couple mornings every week before work, but we'll see.
I've been driven to get my writer website re-designed and functioning again. It'll be done soon. It's practically there now. Maybe by the time I go to bed tonight...
Mar. 13th, 2007 @ 05:42 pm
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I was off from work today. I was off from work, and after some initial Christmas shopping and visiting with the mother, I tried to tend to every creative nook I have: reading, music composition (which is a joke, but that's a whole other story/blog/embarrassment), and writing. For said writing, I decided to head down to the neighborhood bar for a drink. I wore my beanie, tucked my headphones in under the black fabric and my naturally curling hair, and moved on with the novel where I'd last left off Tuesday while sipping on a locally brewed beer.
And it seemed each time I looked up I was being watched. The bartender. The group of women across the bar (U-shaped), obviously drinking together after a day at work, the young couple to my left, the loud men to my right, and all the while I was fixated on the couple in their late thirties directly across from me. As they sat there face to face, looking past one another, one at one TV and the other at another, or people watching, or just staring out the windows, or into the open-faced kitchen, but not at each other, and not talking, and I found myself whispering to myself, mouthing the words, "Say something." I said it three or four times. "Say something." Saw the rings on their fingers. The empty glasses lingering about their elbows. "Say something."
The carpenter seated next to me who tried to strike up a conversation soon as the headphones came out of my ears to let the bartender know I was done.
"Writing down the tunes?" he asked me.
"No." Chuckled. "No."
"Saw you jamming out. Thought you were writing down the tunes."
"No." I smiled. "I'm, um... working on a novel, actually."
Unnecessary information, I don't know why... embarrassed... shouldn't have said anything... now I'm gloating...
"There's a lot to write about," he said.
"That depends," I responded.
He looked at me, like he was awaiting further explanation. But I hardly knew what I meant myself. I glanced to the bartender for help. He's pouring beer from a tap. A beautiful girl just around the corner of the bar is watching our conversation but she tries to appear disinterested. She's sitting alone, drinking a glass of wine, and I wonder if she's waiting for someone or if this is the height of her evening. Too beautiful to be alone. Definitely waiting for someone, I decide.
"It depends on how you see the world," I say to him then.
"Yeah," he says.
"Depends on if you see the realism in it," I said.
I'm talking bullshit. I'm talking bullshit because I'm infected with the mindset of my characters, and I'm wanting to pay my bartab and go home, and because I don't know how to talk to strangers, and because the beautiful girl is still watching us.
"There's a lot in the world to see," I tell him. "Just a matter of whether or not you take the time to recognize it."
"You've got a point there," he says. "Took me forty years to step back."
I nod. Because I don't know what else to do.
"I thought you were writing the tunes," he says again.
I chuckle like a friend. "No. Can't write songs."
"If you can write a novel, I bet you can write music."
"No," I say, and this time I speak with confident truth. "Two completely different languages."
We chit-chat, he goes to the rest room, I pay my tab, he comes back, his back turned to me, staring out the window at the overcast sky, at the gas station across the street, at the traffic going home at ten minutes past five, at the headlights flowing in streams like blood at the dictatorship of the heart, and I pat him on the back as I walk past, and I say to him, "Good luck," and he says to me the same, ( and this is what I wrote just before pulling the buds from my ears )
Dec. 21st, 2006 @ 10:34 pm
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| » Dig |
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I made no word count progress on the novel Dig, perhaps even reduced the word count, but I did sit and work on the manuscript for an hour and a half, which shouldn't seem all that substantial to anyone writing a novel, but it's the first I've spent that much time on it in one sitting in some time. Going back through from the beginning, fixing my lobster trapping facts and otherwise tweaking. Total word count now, either way, is 28,330.
Did, however, have an idea for A Dream for Awakening this evening, too. It's been stuck in novella-land (aka unmarketable) since I completed it over a year ago, but I may have at last figured out the rest of the story to translate it into a novel-length manuscript. And if Dig continues to fight me as much as it has been, I'll turn to that project instead. But that likely won't happen until at least after Christmas, if not after New Year's.
Saturday was, by the way, the one year anniversary of the day on which I began writing Dig in a coffee shop one morning, sitting there unshowered because we had lost power at our house through an ice storm, and I had sat on the phone the night before listening to my girlfriend-of-the-time cry to me for something I hadn't been able to give her (or maybe hadn't been willing to sacrifice, and that's where the self-debate begins), and we were never the same. And that was the emotion off which the novel was born. And has struggled to a word count of only 28k words in the twelve months since, partially on account of the very emotional struggle tangled within its premise. But it's never lost its foundation.
Dec. 19th, 2006 @ 06:33 pm
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Dec. 12th, 2006 @ 10:02 pm
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721 words on the novel. First writing in, I think, fifteen or sixteen days.
Dec. 11th, 2006 @ 12:01 pm
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No writing today but some successful lobster trapping research. I should've done that some time ago.
Nov. 30th, 2006 @ 08:55 pm
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| » 231 |
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231 words on the novel manuscript. Still not much to speak of, and this scene is giving me a bit more difficult of a time than I had expected, but I realized this morning how excited I am about the story here. We haven't gotten to the surreal, fantastical developments yet, and the knowledge they're coming makes the trudging through now tolerable.
Nov. 24th, 2006 @ 10:03 am
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| » 254 |
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A simple 254 words to set up the scene with Jimmy but I wasn't in the headspace to dive fully into it this morning, so it'll wait. Now off to my parents' to help prepare Thanksgiving dinner. May all my American friends have a wonderful and safe holiday. As to you foreigners... eat something good anyway. This doesn't have to be a closed-door party.
Nov. 23rd, 2006 @ 09:43 am
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knowing_carrion's journal