Blogocentric Formulations

Update

It's been a while since I've posted here. Figured I owe everyone (especially myself) a little update in terms of what's been going on with me.

I started the year out really determined to be more productive with just about everything, and ended up falling flat on my face in pretty much all respects except work. The day job has been keeping me extraordinarily busy, but I'm still really loving it. The job is really challenging, but it's nice to have those challenges be the result of the really high expectations everyone has for our movies. We've got a premiere coming up Wednesday night of this week and I never really thought I'd be the kind of person who goes for that kind of thing, but the truth is that I enjoy them because they're a great way to commemorate the completion of a project. I've worked a lot of jobs where one project kind of rolls into the next without a lot of fanfare, so it's really nice to be able to go to an event where you can see all the hard work paying off.

My writing, unfortunately, has taken a real hit while I try to get my head around my job. I haven't written anything substantive in a really long time. This past weekend (Saturday) was the first time I finished a short story for a WDC contest in a long time and I really miss the feeling of finishing a piece of writing. I tried another short story on Sunday and didn't end up posting it because it didn't really turn out the way I was hoping. But the exercise taught me that I'm really out of practice when it comes to writing, and I need to get back on the horse so it's not such a struggle all the time.

This blog is part of that practice. I'm trying out a "writing sprint" idea I got from a self-published author I follow, who suggests very focused writing for short periods of time. You can write for as little as 5-10 minutes, or as much as 45-60 minutes depending on your schedule, but the idea is to turn off all your other distractions and not even focus so much on the technical aspects; the goal is just to get words on the page/screen as quickly as possible so you have something to work with. Then you rinse and repeat, doing as many writing sprints as you can handle each day, until you have a draft of something.

The idea of uninhibited writing is new to me, but so far I'm really liking the idea of churning out a bunch of words so that I have something to edit. I've always thought I'm better at molding and reshaping words that are already there rather than staring at a blank page and trying to will the perfect words into existence, so I'm going to give this method a try for a while. Which probably means there are going to be quite a few more blog entries like this, where they're a little rambling and a little steam-of-consciousness-y... on those days you'll know I wasn't able to schedule myself any dedicated writing time for my other stuff, so I showed up here to get at least one writing sprint in every day so I have some writing practice in.

And I'm at the ten minute mark as a I write this sentence, so I think it's time to call it a night.