In the month since my last update, the only progress I have to report that readers haven’t already seen posted in this space is that I’ve begun implementing a simple timeline-editing program to help me build my outline of our world’s future history, so I hope to finish that outline soon. But beyond that, I’ll reserve any other “plans” until my next update.
It’s been several months since my last update. Read more…
In every poetry post, and in other posts here and there, I beg for your comments—critique, suggestions, questions, and so on—on my work. I haven’t talked about what I’m looking for (or why) in a while, so today I’d like to talk about criticism and comments, in general and specific. Read more…
It’s been a couple of months since the last update; in that time I’ve accomplished more than in previous months (not that that’s saying much), but most new material ran in this space pretty much immediately. The one bright spot was still more revision (polishing, but also some deeper issues) on An Internal Conflict, including yet another draft of the prologue, with the help of the Writing Circle at the Holy Worlds forum.
One of the main projects I intend to attempt in the near future is a somewhat detailed outline of the story that was originally titled “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” (which I serialized here two years ago); a cursory look, as the first step in a more thorough revision, revealed that I left all sorts of loose threads, details that get mentioned early on as if important but never used again, and a lot of the important points of the ending aren’t properly foreshadowed.
I also hope to finally finish my projection of our universe’s future history, which has been “blocking” me for a long time, so I can get on to the next (less knotty) items in my task queue.
In the last month since my last status update, I’ve again accomplished very little, most of which readers of this blog have already seen. I’ve gotten quite a bit of useful feedback from the Writing Circle on the first couple of chapters of An Internal Conflict, though I have yet to make any changes to my local copy, but other than that and (as I mentioned) the various essays I’ve already posted here and a few more poems, I’ve written almost nothing in the last month. Sigh.
With a wee bit of momentum at the moment, hopes for a mild beginning to winter (you may recall that what moved me from being a couple of weeks ahead on this blog to scrambling to get each post up in time was having so much time and energy sapped by my snow-clearing job last winter), and fewer long-overdue letters remaining to write, I have some glimmers of hope of making progress on my writing priorities (which haven’t changed since last month … sigh) in the near future, God willing. But we’ll see.
Since my last writing status update, about a month ago, I’ve gotten even less done than the previous month, which I described in that update. This past month, I’ve written a wee bit of poetry (some of which won’t show up here—it’s for an upcoming birthday) and several essays, including on various aspects of the universe of the Shine Cycle, that have shown up here on this blog.
The one other positive news to report, however minor, is that even though the Internal Conflict prologue, which I had entered in critique group last month, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle (so that I never got a version of it with comments back), now that the group is using Google Docs for this month’s circle I’ve already gotten some helpful feedback on the first two chapters of that novel-in-progress.
My priorities list still hasn’t significantly changed, but I’ll reproduce it here:
Since my last writing status update, I have gotten very little done. I’ve had some new ideas, written a little poetry, and dabbled a bit elsewhere, but the only two areas where I’ve made anything like steady progress are the background (and other) essays that become posts on this blog and one project that I haven’t mentioned before: typing old drafts.
There are (or at least were, as I’ll explain in a moment) some drafts that I made a long time ago—sophomore year of high school, for example—that still existed only in pencil on paper, in my generally atrocious handwriting. And while my writing was generally as bad as my penmanship, some of the ideas and even a few fragments of the prose may be salvageable for use in future writing. (The most valuable would invariably be on the most decayed, illegible, and misplaced sheets of paper, of course.) So to prevent them from deteriorating any further, and to reduce the sheer amount of clutter that surrounds me, I’ve been typing them (or verifying that the writing on the paper matches the digital version, if a page has already been typed) and then discarding the paper copies. Recently, I finally finished typing my incomplete initial draft (from my freshman and sophomore year of high school) of the second planned novel in the Game of Life subseries, The Alliance. (Including revisions made after I started typing it when I was still in high school, it comes to about 59,000 words.) Now that I’ve finished that draft, there are probably others buried somewhere, and I’ll go looking this week, but it might conceivably have been the last. We’ll see.
Next month I expect to have more to report, because I’ve joined a critique group (which is taking up a not insubstantial fraction of my time, not that that’s any excuse) and my Internal Conflict prologue is even now as I write this making the rounds; I hope to make some improvements based on the comments I will receive on it and further pieces I send around.
Other than that, my priorities list from last month is unchanged.
Since my last writing status update, I’ve had another banner month in every writing category except what I said I wanted to make progress on.
I’ve made some initial, somewhat extensive if not all that significant, revisions to the first couple of chapters of my novelette “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage.” While I was working through the second chapter, I noticed a bit of apparent foreshadowing that I’d never done anything with; this will be corrected. But I made no more progress on revising the Internal Conflict prologue.
I’ve continued to work on my projection of Earth’s future history, including starting to work through the feedback I’ve already received, but I haven’t made enough progress to report it as significant yet. And I wrote a couple of character descriptions, but again this is not yet significant progress toward being able to resume posting character profiles in this space.
The most positive thing I have to report is that in the space of about two weeks, mostly at Evart, I wrote on the order of a half-dozen poems. A couple may not be quite presentable yet, and so will need some revision before I can post them, but this is far more than I’d even hoped.
My areas-I-hope-to-work-on-soon list is still basically unchanged from the last two months:
In the time that’s elapsed since my last writing status update, I’ve again accomplished very little. On the other hand, while last month I cited developing possibilities but complained that I’d gotten stalled, I now have a pretty good idea of where to go next.
My revisions of my novelette “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” and the prologue to An Internal Conflict have not progressed in the slightest since last month. But that’s the only “current project” that utterly stalled this past month, despite a much-busier-than-usual schedule.
I extended my projection of Earth’s future history a little bit more. And, after receiving some very helpful feedback from a friend, I both have some new ideas for more content to put in and see that what I already have needs a thorough going-over, which is much more likely to expand the outline (assuming I keep my current rate of noted events per time) than contract it.
And I wrote several new poems. A couple of them have already been posted, and the others will appear in this space on Fridays soon.
My areas-I-hope-to-work-on-soon list is basically unchanged from last month:
It’s been a while since my last status update, largely because until the last couple of weeks I, again, got very little done. (As I warned, though I was far less productive even than I’d feared.)
Recently, however, I’ve made some somewhat significant progress on the Shine Cycle, its background, and my other writing:
Right now I’m mostly working on my strategy game, but once I get to the point of waiting on players rather than them waiting on me I hope to work more steadily on my writing:
A Christian Worldview of Fiction
Rewrite, Reword, Rework
The Bard on the Hill
