Episode #106: Yikes! And Away From Today!

Since this post is a bit of a "come to a full circle with a little deja vu", I thought it would be a nifty idea to post a throwback pic from my early years of blogging. A time when I was full of energy, vigor and vim, and wanting to conquer the blogging world!

yeah, we all know how that eventually turned out: macho man in my 40's and NFTG in my 50's.

Anyways, the reasons for the post are twofold: 1} a sincere effort at writing a weekly blog post and 2} going back to why I got into blogging in the first place.

Due to some global circumstances inflicted on us by those from across the Pacific, we've had to break our minimal pledge of weekly posts. But we do genuinely intend to return to that pledge and get back in that Llama saddle and ride the South American plains again.

The original reason(s) behind writing a blog waaaay back when {'08 I do believe} was to practice my writing and to get away from censorship/harassment issues in the chat room forums {remember those?}. Well, one of the ways that I used to practice/polish my writing skills was to write by hand. You know, whip out that handy-dandy piece of notebook paper and paper, and laboriously hand write, or my case print, words/sentences/paragraphs in order to form coherent stories.

Now, I actually pursued this particular concept for the better part of four plus years before deciding to abandon it for, what turned out to be, about a decade or so. While ultimately it became too much a consumer of time resources to make it worth my while continuing, I did learn a few very valuable lessons from doing it: it forced me to slow down my writing and it forced me to think.

Not sure if you'd ever faced the problem of writing too fast for your brain to keep up, which is basically writing whole sections of a story/assignment/essay before belatedly realizing you forgot to writer a key part/component of said project, which in turn made your project sound very much 'off". Now because writing by hand forced me to slow down, it also forced me to think/plot/plan out what I was writing beforehand. 'Cause you know, when you don't have erasable ink, you want to minimize your cross-outs and make your writing look purty.

Fast forward to the present.

So here we are, year three of two weeks to flatten the curve (raise your hands if you think that this will wax and wane like the yearly flu) and we're back in our den and trying to get back into the groove of completing our next Average American Novel (with the spiffy title of "Novel_Project 3"). At this point, I've settled into a disturbing routine of not wanting to turn my computer back on after 7p but really wanting to write, only to break down a few hours later, turn my computer on, open up the latest chapter and pot around for a few...hours until bedtime approaches, in which we then shut down computer. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Armed with the knowledge that this simply will not do (dammit Jim, I'm a human being, not a politician), we acquiesce to the inevitable and embrace it with all the warmth of an angry porcupine. We dig out a clipboard, a wad of notebook paper, a pen, the newly completed previous chapter so I know where I'm going and the next crappily written ten year old chapter that I'm exterminating with extreme prejudice, sit down at our wooden tray, get everything properly OCD situated and write.

If you think I'm making fantastic progress on this, you are so sadly mistaken that a three year old toddler has enough empathy for you to pass over their bottle to you. I am writing so slow and deliberate that the progress I'm making is measured by the hours it takes to complete one page of handwritten text, with breaks for hand fatigue due to this, usually a minimum of three and a half hours total per day (I often spend an hour in the afternoon and the rest in the evening writing). Also, food for thought, one page of handwritten text usually averages about to about one half to one third of typed text, at least for me.

What does this mean?

Well....I've officially gone through about five pages of crappily written/poorly plotted/poorly thought out typed text, which so far has taken me about a week and a half to produce 16 hand written pages, which translates to about two to three pages of typed text. Yeah, so I'm SlowPoke McMethodciallySlow when I'm writing this way. On one hand, the good thing is I'm back to writing in peaceful solitude. On the other hand, the bad thing is that I'm writing in peaceful solitude.

So in essence, I've come back full circle. I started out the decade of '00 thru '10 writing by hand indoors and outdoors; basically skipped the decade of '11 thru '20 not writing by hand anywhere and now spending the decade of '21 thru '30 and beyond, writing by hand and transcribing to the computer.

For our next post, I should have a better idea grasp on what the actual plot is. No, really. I had a hard time figuring out what it was eleven years ago when I'd first written this....story. But when I'd decided to gut and rewrite from a different point of view, the plot slowly started coming together, and I was able to add a nifty twist while working on this particular chapter. So I'll be able to elaborate not only on that, but a few other things as well.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved