And fuck? I keep reminding myself of an old writing exercise from a workshop I did years ago: your character wants something from someone else. What is it? How does he go about getting it? I have no idea. I've never been able to write characters who are entirely sure of what they want.
These updates have been more for my own gratification than anything, and this one will probably be my last. I'm going to fall short of my goal of ten short stories in the month of February, and that's really okay because it's freaking hard to write ten new short stories during the shortest month of the year. For the past week I've been editing instead, something I tend to neglect. I don't hate what I've written, but at least one story needs a major overhaul, and I've just been picking at it for the past week.
So, to date I have six completed stories in various stages of revision, and one... something that started out promising, but ended up being an extended conversation between to women where they reference everything from Homer Simpson to Adrienne Rich. At least it passed the Bechdel test.
That's quite a bit of work for three weeks.
What I'm planning for March: Editing, editing, editing. Then some more editing.
This is tangentially related, but I wanted to link to this piece on being a writer in "one's head" only. Maybe it's the somewhat flippant tenor, but something about it makes me a little uncomfortable. Or maybe it's because I've have trouble calling myself a writer, period, even while I was getting paid for it. Yeah, I write a lot "in my head," too, and only a fraction of it works when I finally commit it to paper. The trick is you have to get it on the paper first.
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