Chugging along in fits and starts

51 / 90 days to go | 39 / 90 days gone
22,304 / 90,000 words done | 16,696 words behind

Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 11,275

After my brief burst of productivity, I went back to being wordless. Mainly I was reading again - voraciously. I'm rereading through Learn Writing with Uncle Jim now that it's back up and available for reading at Absolute Write. The whole thread is chock full of highly useful writing tips, especially the first 20 pages or so. The last time I went over it, it eventually degenerated into more noise than signal, but the thread as a whole is still going strong, and I suspect it went back to signal after the point where I stopped. I'm on page 8 at the moment.

Absolute Write came back up and when I checked over it, nobody was saying anything whatsoever due to impending lawsuits. So I still don't know exactly how it ended - whether they got back everything completely intact, the way we got back RPoL, or the stuff that's back is just what they've managed to cobble together out of Google caches. I suspect the latter, but there's so much material from pre-yank that it's hard to tell (without having been a regular there before, at least). They did an amazing job of reassembling the forums.

I also found another fun writing community to try out - Orson Scott Card's writers workshop. It's slightly larger than Hobgoblin, has a crowd of regulars in their 30s, and might become useful when I get around to asking for Random Stranger Critiques. I like their format - first 13 lines of a WIP posted to the forum, free for people to crit as an effective opener, or as a sampler for people to ask for the whole story to crit. I like the idea of not having to commit to any minimum amount of work in a regular workshop-style arrangement, but just to participate when I can.

And last but not least, I joined Writing Jam, which is a private workshop here on Hobgoblin. It's not a regular workshop-style crit circle, which I like, and is having a good start (just launched a week or two ago). I'm enjoying it so far. (Details in here :D ).

So basically, while getting myself acquainted with all of those, I didn't write anything for two days. Tonight I wrote a couple roleplay posts that are a week late (the same two posts I mentioned two blog entries ago), and now I'm back to having nothing roleplay-related to do. Turns out that my favorite GM has had the flu, hence his inactivity. Nobody else is showing much signs of life either - crosscountry moves, relationship quandaries, schoolwork, and Internet connections gone kablooey, have taken out just about everyone else. I'm not complaining. It's more time for me to ruminate about writing, and occasionally do some actual writing.