Ten-Finger Exercises

Signing off for now

It's hard to get time to write, and my stats are so low here that I think I may as well stop for a while. Not for good though. I enjoy and value blogging, and appreciate the responses I get from dragonfly and an occasional few others. Bill just cannot give me a quiet moment to do this, even when "we" are watching some TV show he likes. He has to keep talking to me all the time, and I can't think to write. The time I might otherwise grab to blog is now taken up by my commitment to NoWriMo, and trying to finish my short stories and learn more about writing them is a worthy cause to me. I'm at a place where it doesn't come easy any more.

Short things from a prompt flowed easily, even if they didn't necessarily win contests. Given the amount of time I spent on them usually, writing them made me feel witty and clever. Now I'm plodding, and the writing has no flair, just trying to get to a point, an ending. It's sort of against my nature. I generally prefer the journey to the product, the middle to the end, the imaginative words to the plot.

So, even though I'm still blue for the month, I'm not going to try so hard to keep it going.
I have some good ideas for blogs in the future, but don't have the time for them now.

I have a whole stack of old New Yorker magazines, all of last year's and some older ones. When I'm done with my NoWriMo commitment, or at least the month of March, whichever comes first-- I intend to go through all of them. I'll make a spreadsheet of the poetry and note which poems have meter, rhyme, what the subject matter is, etc. . I'm interested to see how that turns out. Then I might do the same with their fiction: look to see how long the stories are, the situations, ethnicity, number of characters, style, point of view, type of ending. I think that will be an interesting subject.

And I hope to write some more Wren and Rupert stories this month.

So, I have plans for this blog, so please come back sometime.