An Experiment

The prospect of writing a book is daunting. Failure seems imminent, so why being, right?

Instead, I'm trying an experiment. Walking through Barnes & Noble looking for journals/notebooks/cards, I stumbled across a green-covered notebook and came up with a swell idea: write a diary for a character in the notebook. And then that expanded into something else.

So, I've written almost one full page front and back in the notebook. Hey, it's a start.

Writing

So far this year, I have not managed to write a great deal on this blog. Nothing much to say, I suppose, other than it's just been a way tough year for me, possibly the hardest one ever, and I just haven't felt like writing a whole bunch. And not being around a computer to type up the things that do pop into my mind.

Driving to work this morning, I was thinking about National Novel Writing Month (affectionately "shortened" to NaNoWriMo) starting up Nov. 1, and how I'll be either driving to VA or in VA for the first few days, but I should write anywhere I can, not just in TX. Then I thought that I should get some voice recognition software for my laptop. Fifteen hundred words a day is a whole lot of typing; dictation is faster-- even with corrections. I'm a decent typist, but not that fast, about 40-50 words a minute (if I know what I'm typing). I also thought about getting one of those digital voice recorders that will transcribe into your computer using voice recognition software (kind of cool and geeky). So many decisions.

I also don't currently have the discipline of writing daily, so I thought I would at least blog every day to help inspire that. We'll see how that goes. I'm also thinking about cheating on my novel-writing by starting it now, just so it's not quite so ambitious a task, as I will give up rather easily. At the very least, I can start planning it now, characters, settings, situations, plot, etc. All in concert to produce my first unreadable writing for fun. Oh yeah, this is for fun. Again, check the "we'll see" column for that one.

Well, it's late or early, depending upon how you look at it. Rather than look, I should just close my eyes and go to sleep. I will after I post and put my laptop out of my bed.

Random Thoughts

So much of the time, I don't write here because I think of great things to write about but never at a time that I can write about them. It seems like a laptop and a trip on the bus could solve some of that since driving to/from work are the usual times I come up with ideas. I tried keeping a tape recorder around, but it scared the thoughts right out of my mind.

Hey, James Blunt just climbed on top of the piano during his performance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live". That suddenly made a somewhat uninteresting song ("1973"?) more palatable. [And, hey, I don't dislike the James, but this song on first listen doesn't do much for me, even live.]

I've thought of many story ideas and conversation snippets; I'm sorry I've forgotten the vast majority of them. Though none of them are as interesting as the idea I read in a Swamp Thing comic (or maybe Sandman) about trees that lure people into their thick to torture them (or something — it's been a few years since I read that particularly story.)

And now, I've forgotten about everything else I was going to write here, even if just a sentence or two.

Meow. Mrow. What's that, Clark? mmrowww laptop? Oh, laptop!

Every November, there is an endeavor undertaken by an increasing number of people. The endeavor is National Novel Writing Month. I'd like to write a novel one day, but motivation escapes me. Oh yeah, an idea, too. Well, I still have lots of ideas that I do remember, but making a whole novel out of some/most of them doesn't seem to plausible at this point. I really think I'd like to have a laptop, too; I could take the bus to work and write for about 30-45 minutes a day, and I could go anywhere and write.

How lame and lascivious: On the next "Inside Edition", are cheerleaders purposefully used to distract the opposing team's players?