You’d think it would be easy for me to slip back into writing– after all, I have a almost two hundred story prompts I could play with, or several dozen half-started stories and universes. Heck, I spent a good few hours yesterday just reading through the nine million posts I have archived (a slight exaggeration, but still). There are so many ideas just waiting to be acted on, so many stories I need to finish telling… it’s actually rather depressing.

So I’ve decided it would be best to take a more NaNoWriMo approach to getting back in the flow. Start from scratch, no expectations, no internal editor (but definitely an internal spell-check, because NaNo 2009 had some scary lunchtime drafts. o_O;;), just a nice white space and a word count. If it turns into an actual story, all the better, but for now I’m going to be happy with words on the page.

For the next seven days my goal will be 100 words of story a day. Not a lot, but I figure on the bad days when I can think of anything, 100 words will at least seem possible… where 750 (Novel_in_90) or 1,667 (NaNoWriMo) feel well nigh impossible. With luck, I’ll be able to raise the bar a bit every ‘week’, but I’ll worry about that later. For now, I just need to finish up this post and fire up Q10.

Muses away!

As you can see, I’ve been playing around with the code on the front page. Since most of my content divides neatly into those three main categories, I’ll be keeping this setup for now.

In theory I’ll need to add another section for the various Works In Progress that aren’t actually serial stories, but I figure I’ll wait until I actually write something in that category before I add it. It’s rather depressing seeing how long ago the dates were on all of the non-NaNo stuff. *sighs*

Ah well, off to the CSS mines… *puts on her spelunking helmet and dives back into the code*

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I haven’t updated the blog since NaNoWriMo fell prey to the ravages of 2009. Woe.

But this should be changing, as I am in the midst of trying to figure out just what this blog is meant to be. Right now it’s sort of a random collection of anything related to writing, and I’d like to at least sort it out a bit into something slightly more coherent to read. *pokes WordPress* So the look of the site may be changing as well (possibly simply putting the major categories on a entry page so browsers could check to see if the things they were interested in have been updated, rather than wading through the chaos). So keep an eye out for construction equipment and don’t panic if it’s goes all akimbo whilst I wrestle with CSS. *puts on hardhat*

And I really need to find a decent spam-filter plug-in, that or just disable the comments on 90% of the posts. *sighs*

There is a contest over on Nathan Bransford’s blog (The 3rd Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge) that is asking for the first paragraph of works-in-progress.

You would think with all the writing I’ve got online that finding a first paragraph that would knock the socks off the competition would be easy. … You would be somewhat less than correct. There is apparently a LOT of writing in The One True Archive folder that has never made it online. In the interest of having several copies of everything (and thus protecting Ye Olde Fic) I’m going to have to start working out what I have where. Of all the stories I have in the various states of WIP-ness, only The Gate to Fenrith Lei had an opening paragraph worth posting. And Gate, bless it’s heart, has the slowest opening in the history of Martha-fic. *sighs*

But it’s posted, which is something, and maybe I’ll get my butt in gear and get something over to Evil Editor. I posted the synopsis for Rise and Walk once upon a time, but I haven’t been back to play lately. I really need to get myself up an out of this non-writing rut I’ve been in. *pokes Muses* November cometh!

Ah well, back to some word sprints, and hopefully a decent nightly wordcount for Silverwitch.

…keeping them. *sighs*

But on that note, I’ll be doing some 10 minute sprints today in the hopes I can just start the nine million WIPs I have. (In fact one of the 10 minute projects is simply making a list of the WIPs. Which will probably take more than 10 minutes. *headdesk*) If all goes well I should end up with a bunch of little scenes that help build up the worlds and the characters. Sort of like fan fiction for my original fiction… only I have just as many WIPs there as I do here.

But I’m going to try and put together a plan that focuses more on keeping myself interested in the projects, and less on planning my moves ahead of time. I think if I can just keep up the fire to write and stop trying to force myself to write specific things at specific times it might work better for me. I am a very attention span deficient writer. An lo, the world is full of SHINY. *solemn nod*