Wednesday, October 20, 2021

October Sweeps - Day 627

Today is Wednesday, when I would normally go to the cabin, and I did consider it, but my mom asked if I would be available tonight to take my nephew to his basketball practice, and I told her I would.  It rained heavily on Monday and lightly on Tuesday, and that probably means another half foot of snow (or more) at the cabin, and since I almost didn't make it on Saturday, I decided to bow out today.  I will try to get some writing done today, even though I was focused on audio editing mostly.

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In October: 2083

I recorded a Conan the Barbarian story last week at the cabin, and it took a lot out of me (it was a super long story; the recording was about eighty minutes), but it reminded me that, about ten years ago, I recorded a Conan story called "The Phoenix on the Sword" for my solo podcast, and then lost the recording, and sat down to record it again.  I had edited some of it (as far as I could remember), but never did anything with it, and a decade passed.

So yesterday, I looked, and sure enough, I still had that work-in-progress (it said I had last worked on it in March of 2013).  So, I transferred that file to my laptop, so I could finish it at the cabin today, and put it out as an episode, before I even start editing the long one.

Push-ups Today: 125
Push-ups In Octobre: 2413

I finished editing the story while I waited for my nephew to practice basketball, and I recorded an episode to go with it.  It was interesting to hear how I did story readings a decade ago, compared to the one I did last week (or maybe it was three weeks ago, crazy how fast the time goes), and hopefully, people enjoy these old stories.  If I had any ambition at all, I'd stick a bunch of my recent readings up on YouTube, but hey, there's only so much fuel in the ambition tank.

Before going to bed, I plugged in my mic and re-recorded a bit on "Underdecorated" that I realized I had gotten wrong while editing at the cabin (using the last name Keith instead of Smith and such), and then I decided to forge ahead and record a chapter of "Hatchling."  Just like the last time (guess it was only Monday), I was astounded (or whatever the most negative synonym for "astounded") by how poor the writing was, how uninspired, how not good I found it.

This was something I worked hard on last year, putting at least a month into of writing every single day.  I often feel bad when I put out a podcast or a cover that's half-assed, but I wouldn't think of the stories themselves as being like that.

Jason Sanford recently sat down with Big and me and talked about writing his first novel.  He said that after the first draft, he put it away for six months, because he knew it had problems that would need to be fixed, and when he picked it up again, had to do a significant rewrite.  I feel like that might be the case with this one, except I wonder if Sanford ever considered just trashing the whole thing and hanging his head in shame.

Not that I'm going to do that--like I said on Monday, "Hatchling" was the best work I could do, something I was passionate about, and maybe it's just my own neurosis telling me it's so terrible.*

Words Today: 411
Words In Octubre: 12,036

*Besides, Chapter 3 is where they find the egg, and the story should kick into second gear then (third or fourth gear coming when it finally hatches, depending on whether the romance is third gear or not).  I hope there's a moment in the next chapter or two where I go, "Oh, okay.  Now it's started getting good.  Thank, Bossk!"

No comments: