Had a breakthrough on something that had me stalled on Blessing of the Wood. I was having trouble with the motivation for things that were going on, and the idea hit me out of the blue yesterday at work.
I’ve incorporated it into what I already had written and moved forward. I’m closing in on 4k words now, and going strong.
Always good, when you have both a deadline and a tradition looming over you. Hope to have more to report later this evening.
I had to put all my writing aside for a few days. When I hit one of those points where the words just don’t come, I get frustrated, and that makes it even harder, and it snowballs. So, I closed Wordperfect, the cover images, maps, and everything else, and relaxed for a while.
Opened things back up yesterday, and I’m moving forward on the Earth Day story, now retitled “Blessing of the Wood”
It’s flowing — thankfully — so I hope I’m back on track. Up to 3k words.
I’d hit another drag point in Sanctuary of the Wood, and had a brainstorm today at work that got me past it.
It’s amazing what a small change of location can do.
I moved the scene from the tree fort to the pond, and it’s moving along nicely. I was getting too distracted with the tree fort *laugh*
Had some flashes of inspiration on SOTM too. Things are about to come to a boil, and I’m going to hit something I’ve been anticipating for a long time. I’ve been wanting to tie a story into the larger narrative of Danica’s world ever since I wrote it, and knew how it was going to happen, but I just wasn’t at the right point in the story to do it.
That time is coming.
Really getting an itch to finish Lowborn as well, but Sanctuary has to have full front burner status until I finish it, because of the limited timetable and the long-standing tradition.
Experimenting with a few more things, but I’m close to having everything ready to get the LST3K pages online. The big interactive feature – uRiff – won’t debut with the initial rollout, but I’ll have most of the elements I need for it ready to start coding when I feel like it.
Many of those same elements will be useful in the behind-the-scenes collaborative riffer coding that will let me work in semi-real time with other people to riff on stories.
Chugging along on Sanctuary of the Wood when I can. Had some longer hours at work and a lot of other stuff on my plate, but it’s coming along.
I’m concentrating on it for the time being because of the contest deadline ( which while still quite a ways in the future, can be a problem if I encounter muse issues ) and the tradition I have of posting one every year. I don’t want to break that.
I’m enjoying the change-up from the last few. I mentioned it a few blog posts ago, but this one is a different type of story, though it will still be easily recognizable as part of the series. I’m just blending the more recent stories with the first in the series.
Thought I’d drop a line. I also make posts on the forum and sing out on the shoutbox there, so there may be stuff there even when I don’t update this blog. If it looks silent for a day or two, check those other places and see if there’s something going on 🙂
The new direction of Sanctuary is one I’m much happier with. It doesn’t have that draggy feeling the original was giving me.
I went through the blog subscribers and eliminated around 70 that either showed up in the spam database, had names that looked plain spammy, or came from the .ru/.pl domains. Hope I didn’t get any legitimate subscribers, but I’m trying to clean up things now that the new anti-spam plugin is catching the spam subscribers before they can clutter my database 😀
I am so loving this spam database. It’s like the Roach Motel for spammers. They check in, but they don’t check out.
Not that I’m complaining about the standard plug-in that catches spam comments. It does a wonderful job as well, and hasn’t let a single spam comment come through. It just wasn’t stopping spam registrations, and this one is 🙂 It’s the double-whammy.
When you combine that with the same spam protection on the forum, my website is now wonderfully free of spammers. I smile every morning when I get up and evening when I get home from work as I review the error log of banned spammers desperately trying to log in or post spam.
I’m going to try to remember to start adding tags to my blog posts, in order to better index in search engines. That’s good for everybody, because it can lead to more feedback, which helps my motivation, which gets more stories out.
