Saturday, November 01, 2003
Jet planes, robot autopsies, Hallowe'en, colds and novel writing
It's been a fun few days here in the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere.
The Kids' father arrived on Wednesday, much to the delight of the Kids and myself—I'm sure Spring was a bit ambivilent about it. Also on Wednesday I could feel a cold slowly coming on.
Thursday the cold hit me. Also, the Kids and their father flew off to Colorado for the next two weeks or so. We'll have a nice and quiet (and clean! It's so clean! And it'll stay clean!) home for fourteen days!
Friday
brought Hallowe'en and a full blown cold down on me. Spring spent the day
decorating the place and carving pumpkins, and I spent the day in a haze of
sleep and vegetation in front of the television.
The secret of becoming a writer is that you have to write. You have to write a lot. You also have to finish what you write, even though no one wants it yet. If you don't learn to finish your work, no one will ever want to see it. The biggest mistake new writers make is carrying around copies of unfinished work to inflict on their friends.
I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.
Today I felt half-human (although still far from doing much) and started on the first bit for National Novel Writing Month, banging out about a thousand words today. A thousand words of pure crap, but a thousand words none-the-less. Only 49,000 left for NaNoWriMo and 999,000 if I'm following Jerry Pournelle's advice.
And that pretty much brings us up to date.
