huckleberryjam

Why is it so hard to type up a story I've already written out in a notebook? It's not like I'm doing any creative work. (Ok, except for a certain amount of tweaking. But I don't think that's the issue.) Why should just typing up already formed sentences be just as draining and frustrating and damn slow as writing it in the first place?
Bah.

So I'm writing this Romance. It involves, among other things, a bit of a culture clash--the protagonists have a hard time figuring each other out, and there's an assumption of contempt on both their parts. It's written from the hero's point of view, but there's information I feel I need to give the reader that the hero doesn't know. But I really don't want the reader to know what the heroine is thinking--a big part of the humor is the low-level bewilderment of the increasingly smitten hero, and I want the reader to share in his gradual discovery. So do I do it from her point of view and just leave out what she thinks of him? I could just not make it come up, but I think if I was a reader I would really notice the omission. Do I zoom out and talk about her from an omnipotent narrator's POV? The problem with that is it's a very close-up sort of story, very heavy on the dialogue, so it would be a big shift.
Bah.

It's such a nice feeling when you can't think how to continue a story, and you have just about decided that it's no good and you may as well throw it into the recycling bin, real or digital, and you read through it to see if there's any possible way to salvage the damn thing and find yourself really interested, laughing at the jokes and smiling at the sweet moments you forgot you wrote.



Of course, there are also the parts you skim past because you hate them so much you can't bear to reread them....

There was an article in yesterday's Times about how sitting is bad for you. People who sat for seven hours at a time (how do you even DO that?) messed up their blood-sugar and insulin levels. People who got up every twenty minutes to walk for a couple minutes tested at better levels. I tend to hop up and move around the house a lot when I'm working on the computer, especially when I'm writing stories. I used to curse my short attention span, but I guess I can start celebrating my inability to write more than a paragraph at a time without getting up and walking around. (because, you know, those chicks have to be checked on every 15 minutes...)
This has saved a few meals, though: only when I lose my concentration and get up to wander into the kitchen do I remember I left a pot on the stove that is now boiling madly.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/sunday-review/stand-up-for-fitness.html


(Sitting and watching TV is even worse. Apparently after factoring out everything else researchers found that by not watching TV as adults people could extend their lives for up to a year and a half.)

The worst part of public speaking is not the actual speaking, or even the nervous anticipation. The worst part is critiquing yourself afterwards. I shouldn't have gone off on that dumb tangent, and mispronounced that easy word, and paused to apologize instead of just sailing on through.... Oh, and how`many times did I say um?


But now I am eating chocolate chip cookies warm out of the oven. Molten chocolate makes everything better.

Yummy, a brand new journal. What shall I do with you?
Babble about baby chicks? Share recipes? Discuss my secret vices? (Trashy novels and country music.)