Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Time for the Tinfoil Hat

I had a pretty productive day yesterday: yoga, grocery shopping, meeting my writing time quota (yay! First time in ages!), then youth musical rehearsal. Oh, and I actually cooked dinner and managed to make my bed before leaving for yoga in the morning. Today's shaping up to be as good, since I've already washed a load of sheets and just put in a load of towels and I've cleaned the bathtub. I should be able to manage some cleaning/organizing work before I get to writing in the afternoon.

I'm still in the rewriting/fixing phase of dealing with what I've already written, but that's involved deleting scenes, writing new scenes, and deleting chunks of scenes to write new scenes, so there's been new writing. I may make it to the end of what I have written today. Sort of, as there's one scene that I think may be moved to later in the book, but there will likely be about 20,000 new words written before I get there, so I'm not sure it counts. It may rain later today, but right now it's such a pretty day that I may put up the patio umbrella and work outside.

Something I forgot to mention in my discussion of the new Cinderella movie: I may need to get out the tinfoil hat again. Last year, as a kind of writing exercise I attempted to write a short story, and as is usual for me, it spiraled out of control until it no longer counted as "short," which meant the ending was terribly rushed because I realized it needed to stop, right away. Then I put it aside because I wasn't sure what to do with it. This story was something of a spinoff of the Cinderella story, showing what was happening to some other people who were at the ball. I have not shown this story to anyone, even my mom (I keep forgetting to send it to her). Well, there was a scene in the Cinderella story that isn't in any version of the fairy tale I've read and that wasn't in the Disney animated version that was very, very similar to a scene in my story -- the same setting, the characters are doing essentially the same thing. And there's a character in the Cinderella movie who's given a name here (after never getting one in most versions of the tale, including the animated movie), and that name is the same as I named the main character in my story.

When I finish the current book, I may take another look at my story. I'll need to change the character's name because I don't want to look like I was copying and I don't want to confuse people who might think it's the character from the movie and I'm writing fan fiction. I'll need to flesh it out a bit and rework the ending, but if I'm not worried about length, I may have a novella or novelette that I can self publish (where I'd make a lot more money than I'd make trying to sell to a magazine).

But first, the current book. However, this renewed interest in another project is a good sign because it means the creative part of my brain is waking up again. I also had a dream last night about writing a "gothic" type story -- one of those creepy old house with a mystery stories. I wish I could remember more of what the story was actually about. I just remember that somehow I ended up inside the story and knew it was the story I was working on.

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