Writing: February 25th & 26th

So, on this, the last Saturday of the month, I didn't have had a ton of time to write.  I took my sister to the airport, then spent a few hours in the city, picking up some stuff, but wanted to make it home in time to go to my nephew's last basketball game.

2/25
Words Written: 486
Total Words: 20,259

But I still managed to write during lunch, taking my notebook in with me.  And I took it to the ballgame (which they actually won), and managed a few words here and there.  I haven't made much progress on the story since Thursday (the info-dump day), but considering I think I started it just this week, I shouldn't feel too bad.

I also have a couple of other projects I've been working on.  I finished up the little sketch I wrote for me and Renee and Big to perform, but who knows how many listeners it would lose us, so perhaps I should do it for the Outcast, which hasn't got listeners to lose.  I also worked on an old project, an audio drama I wrote years ago that I thought I would translate into a story.  Big did the same with one earlier this month, and I thought we might do them as an episode (or two), just to see how things changed going from one format to the other.  I dunno.  At the very least, I'll put it in one of my audio collections.

2/26
Words Written: 613
Total Words: 20,872

A friend of mine was going through "Newfound Fame," giving me notes before I put out the audiobook, and made the gruesome discovery that one of the characters changes names partway through.  I did a search on the document, and there were dozens of uses of the wrong name.  Guess I was too hard on Dean Wesley Smith.

But I thought I'd sit down and try to re-record every single one of those sections, and see if I couldn't get it all edited in and done in one afternoon.  So, I sat down and went through the whole story, fixing the names one at a time.  But enough time had passed since I wrote it that now I found little parts I didn't like the phrasing of, or places where I thought it needed clarification.  I ended up adding between six and eight hundred words to the piece.  The reason I'm not so sure is that, as I was reaching the end, I discovered my microphone wasn't plugged into my recorder . . . which happens about one in five recording sessions.  Arggh.

The only thing I could think to do was a) save the revised document, and b) undo everything I had changed and start again, simply hitting Redo as I went.  It actually took a lot less time the second go-through, and I still found lines that were fixable or words I thought could be changed.  It was a frustrating, stupid mistake (getting the name wrong, I mean), but it was a blessing in disguise, since it gave me the chance to do another draft, at least in those sections.  If I had screwed up the main character's name, imagine where it might have gotten me.

Regardless, I had no way of calculating the word count on my revision (okay, there is a way, and it would be fairly easy), so those words won't count for the day.  But I did fine anyway, since I took my notebook with me when I was getting my oil changed and got a couple pages written there.

Rish