Work In Progress

The aim of this Blog was to ease me back into writing regularly. A few years ago, I joined up with an internet writing group, and churned out a couple of very well-received stories. For one reason or another, though, it all dried up. I had (have) ideas for plenty more stories, but I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and write... and the story I'd been working on at the time (approaching 30,000 words) ground to a halt.

Part of me still thinks it's a numbers thing. I kept doing wordcounts, and as they crept ever higher, I found it more and more difficult to carry on, because I was only intending to write short stories, and I seemed to be heading towards a novel.

Not that that would be a bad thing...

For the most part, I just started getting very critical of everything I wrote and, while I'd often come up with whole paragraphs that I really liked - invariably whenever I was nowhere near a computer, or anything else I could write with - I never managed to write them out, and ended up forgetting them. I even bought myself a little PDA - a Hewlett Packard Jornada 720 - for just those occasions... and yet I never remembered to keep it with me.

The other problem is that sometimes I find the act of writing such a chore. All that typing or scribbling... it's just dull. I need some way of directly transfering what's in my head into a Word document, or something. That'd be perfect.

To make matters worse, all my writing for the group was initially based around one character, with a few set to be recurring characters. All of a sudden, one day, one of my 'other' characters became a key player in another story with another main character... who quickly became more interesting than my original main character, and with a whole great, sweeping story arc of her own. After coming up with a few ideas to get that rolling, it quickly dried up.

Except that's not quite fair to say... It's all still there, whizzing around in my head, but I just can't focus on writing.

Which, going back to the original point of this post, is the point of this Blog: A focal point, and 'practice', to get back into the habit of writing. The problem I'm having now (aside from time) is that I find myself automatically censoring everything I think about writing, to the point that there's no purpose in writing it. Don't want to say too much about work, because that's got me in trouble in the past (although that was on my website, which many of my colleagues knew about and, as briefly mentioned in my first post, was obsessed over by one of them), and I can't force myself to come up with witty/crazy things to write about, like the 3D photography post... That sort of thing will occur to me at random.

I can only hope that I'll start coming up with things, because I really do want to get back into writing, and I'd rather not resort to raiding my old stuff to bulk up this blog. Of course, when something interesting happens in my life - such as the Expo recently, and the upcoming Memorabilia - I shall endeavour to write about them... but I do have this nagging feeling (damn you, self-doubt) that I'll go for quite long periods without updating this thing.

One fun bit of news today came from an ex-colleague, well known for being connected for all the gossip. It seems that two of my least favourite ex-colleagues have had some recent upsets. One is looking for a new job because her current (rather prestigious) employer won't give her a pay rise (and absolutely not because no-one there likes her, wants to go to lunch with her, or will even refer to her by name). Another recently split from her boyfriend (another ex-colleague!) after being - and here I quote - "a bit naughty". Considering the way her previous relationship broke up, this surprises me not one bit.

One thing I will mention about work today... As previously mentioned, one member of the department was recently let go. Since then, it has occasionally been observed that many of the silly little problems we had, which often resulted in delays, aren't happening as often. Still happening, and I'd never expect them to stop entirely, but the occurences of the sillier problems are statistically more likely to be accidental now... They used to happen far too often.