SFR Month 2 Day 5

SFR 2006:
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind

Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281

Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.

I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.

I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).

Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.

Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).

I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.

Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...