So I'm gonna cheat for a blog entry right now. It's technically midnight as I'm typing this. By my established rules, that would make this a current day blog: Saturday, the seventh, rather than Sunday, May 8th.
I feel like doing this tonight, though, and given I already made a lengthy entry for today and may not have content tomorrow (never know), it's gonna be my Sunday entry instead. Basically, my blog, so I'll go ahead and run it the way I want to.
So anyway. First time in sixteen years or so I didn't attend the Pacific Northwest Teen Square Dance Festival. I figured, I'm aged out (21 is the cutoff), too much hassle for work, not worth the effort given my lack of commitment to the dancing.
I knew a lot going into this. I knew the caller for the Preteen mysteries, and suspected he was the caller for all of the mysteries. (He called for my club and went through that one.) I was, apparently, right. I also got to hear all the round dance compulsories (what they have memorized) AND hash (the equivalent to mysteries), so knew them as well.
The people I wanted to do well did well, though.
What I mostly did instead is write. But I have to say...looking at my novel.
I feel like there's a great novel there.
I have great insight into the human mind.
Powerful, evocative word choice.
Good characters.
Interesting world, and plot that is decent.
Fair pacing.
It's got everything...
...Except...
...I feel like it is plagued by problems: constant rewrites are one issue, but another is I feel like the novel suffers from my own natural verbosity and repetition.
I can do a LOT to fix this myself, yet...at the same time, I feel powerless to stop it at all.
When playing mafia, it's actually the main thing I work on in alts. I establish them in part because I like to try and control it. As in, I create the alt, I establish a speaking pattern which is carefully constructed, word for word, to be as succinct as possible, and continue doing this repeatedly, time and time again.
...The problem is...it fades with time. For a novel, I'm dealing with hundreds of pages. Literally, hundreds of pages, which I have to manually scan. I'm not typing from scratch; I'm editing what's already in existence. The result is that things slip through, I can make things worse rather than better, it's just...not good.
And...it doesn't last. It doesn't last on my alts (my more verbose, repetitive style ALWAYS seeps back in), it doesn't last in my writing. I want to be a good writer.
I want to continue being a good writer SO badly. I have the emotions: the humor, the tearjerking, the nightmare fuel, the awesomeness, the heartwarming, the interactions, the realism, everything you can ask for, handled well, balanced.
I just...can't make it last. It just has it lost.
I feel like doing this tonight, though, and given I already made a lengthy entry for today and may not have content tomorrow (never know), it's gonna be my Sunday entry instead. Basically, my blog, so I'll go ahead and run it the way I want to.
So anyway. First time in sixteen years or so I didn't attend the Pacific Northwest Teen Square Dance Festival. I figured, I'm aged out (21 is the cutoff), too much hassle for work, not worth the effort given my lack of commitment to the dancing.
I knew a lot going into this. I knew the caller for the Preteen mysteries, and suspected he was the caller for all of the mysteries. (He called for my club and went through that one.) I was, apparently, right. I also got to hear all the round dance compulsories (what they have memorized) AND hash (the equivalent to mysteries), so knew them as well.
The people I wanted to do well did well, though.
What I mostly did instead is write. But I have to say...looking at my novel.
I feel like there's a great novel there.
I have great insight into the human mind.
Powerful, evocative word choice.
Good characters.
Interesting world, and plot that is decent.
Fair pacing.
It's got everything...
...Except...
...I feel like it is plagued by problems: constant rewrites are one issue, but another is I feel like the novel suffers from my own natural verbosity and repetition.
I can do a LOT to fix this myself, yet...at the same time, I feel powerless to stop it at all.
When playing mafia, it's actually the main thing I work on in alts. I establish them in part because I like to try and control it. As in, I create the alt, I establish a speaking pattern which is carefully constructed, word for word, to be as succinct as possible, and continue doing this repeatedly, time and time again.
...The problem is...it fades with time. For a novel, I'm dealing with hundreds of pages. Literally, hundreds of pages, which I have to manually scan. I'm not typing from scratch; I'm editing what's already in existence. The result is that things slip through, I can make things worse rather than better, it's just...not good.
And...it doesn't last. It doesn't last on my alts (my more verbose, repetitive style ALWAYS seeps back in), it doesn't last in my writing. I want to be a good writer.
I want to continue being a good writer SO badly. I have the emotions: the humor, the tearjerking, the nightmare fuel, the awesomeness, the heartwarming, the interactions, the realism, everything you can ask for, handled well, balanced.
I just...can't make it last. It just has it lost.
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