The right time to write …
I’ve been meaning to write here again since my last entry … but never seem to find the time :p But then again, that seems to be a common complaint of mine recently. I’ve been thinking of getting to work on the novel that I started a while back thanks to Laurie but even that has been progressing in fits and starts. I’d never really thought of writing a novel before I met Laurie – all I really wanted to do were short stories because I didn’t think I could sustain the effort needed to produce a novel … mostly because I’m really impatient and want everything done now but also because my writing style changes from day to day and depending on what my mood is. But somewhere along the way (probably because I heard her talk about writing novels day in day out :p) I got started on a novel and suddenly I realized that by Jove, I could actually do it 🙂
Another incentive of course was the program that I’d started on for Laurie. She’d mentioned the need for a good writer’s text editor and I scoured the net for something which had all the features that both she and I needed and couldn’t find anything that had every feature we wanted. In fact, in most cases, we didn’t even come close. So I decided that I might as well go ahead and write my own :p So was born Amanuensis – which is still very much a work in progress – and I needed something to test Amanuensis with and since I tend to hate using junky test data, I actually decided to use the novel that I wanted to do as the test data 🙂
Anyway, the first rush of work (and testing on Amanuensis) got me up to around 20,000 words and I am pretty happy with that since I don’t think I’ve ever written that long a story before. But then I got stuck – as usual, I got sidetracked, Amanuensis was put aside and I went on to other things. Since then, I’ve come back to Amanuensis several times and made some major changes to the program for Laurie but I haven’t actually gotten back to writing on a daily (or even extended time period) basis. I do think about the story and add to the characters, dialog, events and so on but haven’t actually sat down to do any extensive writing. I feel that it’s time to do so … but have been finding that time is always the issue. Of course, if one wants to write, and I mean really write, I don’t think anything would stop you. So, I’m still probably making excuses for myself since I’m a lazy git :p But I’m closer to actually putting down words on paper again … so let’s see where it goes 🙂