Still writing away, a little bit each morning. This week I spent three days on a single scene. It was a scene I had sort of outlined, and yet the first day I spent on it, I wrote it without taking into account the realities of the story I'd written so far. I realized that, and rewrote it the next day, and then realized later that day I'd *still* written it wrong. So I rewrote it again the following morning.

Now, I do try to live by the motto that editing during the first draft is something to be avoided, but sometimes, you just have to get an initial scene right to move on with the story. So I think it was time well spent.

Back in the 20th century, decades were easy to name. "Eighties," "Nineties," etc. But what do you call the first decade of the century? The "Zeros"? And the upcoming decade...is that the "Teens"? At any rate, a decade is changing, and we need to give the one that is passing a name so we can make sweeping generalizations about it. One old-fashioned suggestion is the "Aughts." Other folks have suggested the "Naughts." But I like the guy who suggested the "Naughties."

Now before I wax sentimental about what Life in the Naughties was for me, let me throw my two cents in on the issue of whether, in fact, the decade *is* actually changing. There is a contingent that thinks 2010 falls into the Naughties, and not the Teens. They're the same group that thinks the 21st century started in 2001.

What?

Any computer programmer will tell you, you don't start counting at 1, you start counting at 0. When a child is born, we don't instantly declare him or her one year old, we wait a year. For the first year of their life, they are 0 years old. Likewise, the first year of the century is 2000, and the first year of the upcoming decade is 2010.

So, about those Naughties. I don't know what people will say about "America in the Naughties" or "the World in the Naughties," but the Naughties for me began shortly after I left academia and moved to San Francisco. I lived in SF for another seven years, worked at the same job, moved a few times, bought my first home. Then, in 2007, I moved to Arizona and bought my second home.

In the Naughties, I entered my forties.

In the Naughties, my writing was hit and miss. I worked hard with a writing coach to finish the novel I started in 1993, then buried it away on a computer disc and spent the subsequent years writing and completing a "tour-de-force" website (not my words) and a couple fan fiction epics (my words, hee).

In the Naughties, there were dates and girlfriends, but no one really special, which was disappointing. I gained a sister-in-law, a nephew, a niece, a grandnephew, and lost an aunt, a cat I had for nearly two decades, and my father. My sister became estranged from the family.

And in the Naughties, I made a lot of friends. When I contemplate what was different about life before the year 2000 and life now, the one thing that seems to characterize this decade for me was ATPo. ATPo was officially born on Jan. 1st, 1999, but it sat on the interwebs for another year and a half before the discussion board was added (June, 2000). After that came the ATPo Posters, and then the Move to Live Journal, and then the Gatherings. There were kerfuffles and our patented Takeovers Of Threads Started By Trolls, essays on the shows that were actually (Long) when warned to be so, group fan fiction and Scythe-Murders to initiate new members.

When I think of the Naughties, I will think of spending entire weekends on ATPo episode analyses when I should have been dating, and wonderful spaghetti dinners cooked by midnightsjane and washed down with fresne's wine. I will think of atpotch skipping through Queens. I will think of the train ride I took one August to get from the ATPo gathering in Chicago to my brother's wedding in Denver, with a stop-over to visit ann1962. I will think of friends on the internet wondering where I was--and how I was--the night "Origin" aired. I will think of a lo-tech website I created ending up on a cable television show.

When this decade started, there was no such thing as an ATPoer. In 2006, I was hanging out with "old friends I had met for the first time" in England and France (like londonkds, ninerva, and etrangere). Today, I am thinking about how life can take odd left turns that change everything.

I continued this week with the daily morning writing practice, although it was less a timed 10-minute exercise and more a half-hour to one-hour one. This is partly because I was on vacation and had the time, and partly because I'd gotten far enough in the story last week that I could start folding in many of the fictional prose blurbs I'd written in the last year and that took a bit of time. The half hour or hour consisted of me digging through my old blurbs, finding ones I could use, altering them a little, getting distracted by the internet or TV, then altering them some more to expand the story. There were some new bits as well.

I'm still finding the story and still trying to bond with the story, but keeping to my daily practice keeps me focused even when I feel a bit like this isn't going to go anywhere.

Continued with my morning writing this week. I am still working on the parts I outlined as "the beginning," and much of it is still awkward and uncertain. I'm also still finding myself starting the various threads of the story in scenes that occur before my chosen point-of-view characters enter the story.

I'm starting to realize, however, that none of this matters. Whatever gets me into the story is good, and can be taken out later if need be.

The goal right now is just to write and get a practice going.

I had planned on starting to write this week, but realized that simply finishing sorting all my story ideas was not enough, I had to look through them and decide which ones I liked best, to give me a place to start writing. So that's pretty much all I accomplished this week, what with work getting busy and family stuff, good and bad.

I will start writing this coming week. I will!

Still organizing and sorting my story ideas, but I'm almost finished and December is upon us. So that means writing already, damn it, and the plan (I think) is this: morning pages. That seemed to work well for me when I was generating ideas, partly because the first-thing-in-the-morning thing kind of bypassed the critical left brain, and partly because it was only ten minutes. You can do ten minutes, can't you? Less pressure. The other thing I'd like to try is to stick to a chronological narrative. In my earlier writing attempts on this story, I worked off prompts of various sorts, and that produced a lot of random bits. That was on purpose to generate ideas. But now I am thinking that if I want to keep my interest in the writing going, I need to tell myself a story. As in, "this happens, and then that happens, and then, what happens next?"

So that's the plan.

Not a lot to report this week, still plugging away at sorting out my story notes, and hoping to get that done by the end of the month. Still have the same plan to find a way to begin writing at that point.

November is turning out to be a "take-stock" sort of month for me. Which makes sense. I finished a five-year-long writing project on the last day of October, and am only days away now from my birthday. Today marks the two-year anniversary of starting my present job. Pinned between those those events as I am, I feel take-stocky--cleaning the disaster zone that is my house after pouring most of my energy into writing and home improvement; organizing and filing away the piles of paper work that have just accumulated because I throw everything papery that is not an unpaid bill or obvious junk mail in a big pile; making a *budget* (eep).

And continuing the process of pulling together and collating all the ideas on my new story I've come up with in the last year.

I think the next step will be to pick a few of the ideas I like best, and just start writing. No outline, minimal quality control, no word count or deadline goals. And as soon as I run out of ideas, return to my giganamous idea font. And of course report in here that I am indeed doing that.

Well, I am back to writing original fiction again. This week started out with me cleaning up some chapters of my old "93 novel"--Dis/inhibition, which was a good transitional task from the manic editing of the final episode of The Destroyer to the nebulous idea mass that is my new story.

In fact, after a couple days immersing myself in my old novel, I wondered if I'd get to the new story at all this week. My "plan" for the week had been simply to come up with some sort of plan with regards to the new story. The time away from it to finish TD has been good, it gave me a chance to mull over what I'd done in the last year and reflect on it without being too invested in what I had been doing with the story when I left off.

And in fact, there were times in the last month when I really started to have second thoughts about some of the choices I had made in the new novel. Characters I wasn't sure interested me all that much, story elements I wasn't sure interested me all that much.

And my interest is so damned important, I can't over-exaggerate how much. How many stories have I invested time in only to have it fizzle out mid-way because a major element in the story just *didn't* interest me? This is my fear, this is why, after a year, I still haven't started actually writing the thing. Because every damned time I start a new story, I get bored of what I'm doing long before finishing.

This is a danger in novel-length projects. You'd better be in it for the long haul, otherwise, it's a waste of time. And since I seem constitutionally incapable of writing shorter pieces, this is my dilemma.

Anyway, what I ended up doing this week was going back to the idea-gathering-sifting-organizing project I was working on before the hiatus. Most decidedly *not* to turn it into any outline, but just to take stock of what I have. And that is my "plan" for now.

But the main goal has to be to find some way to start writing. To get past my fear of losing my muse for this story halfway through it.

I didn't actually work on any original fiction this week, only plunked out the second-to-the-last episode of The Destroyer, which gets me that much closer to getting back to original fiction. The second draft of the final episode is going slow, though. I keep finding distractions like wandering aimlessly through the aisles of Home Depot and you know, working late and stuff.

OTOH, prior to the working late, work last week was a little slow at times, and I found myself re-reading these weekly writing updates for the past year. As I did, I kept thinking, "Oh, that was a good idea, I should remember that for when I get back into it." So I started keeping all the little nuggets in a separate file. The plan, as soon as TD 219 is out, is to complete the survey I had been doing (before I experienced fan fictus interuptus) of all my many, many story ideas from the last year, but I am not going to do an outline. Re-reading the cumulative wisdom of the last twelve months has convinced me of that. My story will just have to meander a bit, then get chopped. With future episodes novels in the series, stuff can be moved.

This is just a placeholder for November. I'm about halfway through the second draft of TD 218. Want to have 219 up and shiny and finished before NaNo hits.

Not a lot of original fic writing this week. I spent some time plunking out the last two eps of TD, and I suck at multi-tasking. And that's probably going to be what happens this coming week as well. But the plan is on track to get back to the new story in November. I'll still be going through all my notes at that point, rather than writing, probably, but it's the energy of NaNoWriMo I'm interested in, not the (insane) structure of it.

Sometimes I really over-do it on the weekends, since that's the only large blocks of free time I have. I undertake multiple projects, expecting to somehow get to all of them and get them done. And then I crawl in here on Monday morning still expecting to be fresh for work.

Um.

Anyway, the art framing projects started wrapping up this weekend. I got three pictures actually hung. One frame is too small for the space it's in. Another is too gaudy, I think, and the third came out quite well. That was the guest bath and front hallway. The two pictures ready for hanging in the master bath didn't get hung because I wanted to tackle the paint touch-ups I've been procrastinating for two weeks. Oh, make that three weeks. Which I did tackle. I got most of them finished. But I didn't even start the master bath paint touch-ups until Sunday afternoon.

Some of the weekend was spent getting back into TD. I'm writing 218 and 219 simultaneously, so they'll have the continuity they need. I'm not finished the first draft of either. Final episodes are hard, because there's a lot of ground to cover wrapping up loose threads (or some mixed metaphor like that). Anyway, when I was writing 217 I discovered that the only way to remember everything that needed to get in there was to make multiple passes through the episode, concentrating on and detailing only one character at a time. Or sometimes, concentrating on a single MacGuffin, making sure the details about the object or concept unfolded correctly from scene to scene. Then I'd pass through again filling in details from another character or object or whatever.

So that's how I'm doing it this time as well. Layering.

When something is complicated, it's a good way to go.

The big distracting project for the weekend was this frame I'm creating for my Celtic wall hanging. I got the lumber guy at Home Depot to cut a 2x3 sheet of very thin plywood for me. Then I went to the grocery store and found an inexpensive meat tenderizer and distressed the plywood. I think I overdid the little holes, though, which, it turns out, show up even more obviously after layering first black, then bronze, and finally gold paint on top of them. I had Googled pictures of "distressed metal" trying to get an idea of the look I was shooting for, but getting that look has ended up being a long weekend of one experiment after the other, from sponges to spackle to dripping paint Jackson Pollock-style to dry brush dabbing. You name it, I tried it. Layer upon layer.

I felt very Artistic by mid weekend. Although I must say, if I'm going to put that much time and energy and creative thought into a piece, I'd much rather prefer it be a novel.

I have months and months and months of material I've generated on this story that kind of gets out of sight, out of mind, and I wanted to sift through it before I really started to draw a picture of what my plot was going to look like. I started going back over it all, pulling out the bits I like and gathering them up with the intention, when I'm done, of organizing them into something resembling an outline.

That was last week, and that's pretty much how I spent this week as well. I finished up the gathering phase and started the organizing phase, which is going to keep me busy for a while. Especially since, having neglected The Destroyer all week, I need to get back to that in the coming week.

I'm not sure all of this is going to result in an outline at the end. I think some of folks who responded to my last entry have an idea that's more workable for me--having a general idea where I want the characters to be at the end of the story, and then letting them lead the way as I actually write.

So right now I'm gathering all the ideas I've generated in the past year, both the ones I decided to keep and the ones I decided to discard, with the hope of reaffirming the choices I've already made, but also just to have everything in one place as I start to write to draw from or ignore as I choose, but nothing that is set in stone.

Finished my living room window valences/cornices. Mostly look good, but there are a few things to tweak. Got back into my 21-steps project with the new original fic story. Am now on a roll with TD 218. Found great Thai food in Phoenix.

Bleh. Now it's Monday again. Bleh.

So, yeah, not much went on in the original fiction department this month. But TD 217 is out the door, so this is just an update to say I'm digging back in.