Old Year's Resolutions
Dec. 5th, 2006 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2Is it too early to make any resolutions? (We can use a different word if you don't like the R word). I feel like I made some resolutions back in August when I started walking an hour a day and being careful of what I eat. Mostly since the weather turned bad, I've been failing to walk anything close to an hour a day, or even to get a reasonable (30 minutes) amount of exercise every day, but I've been pretty good about watching my diet at least (I even lost a pound or two over Thanksgiving, imagine that). My goal is still to get up every day and try to walk -- well, lately it's been 15-30 minutes, I really should be aiming more for 45 minutes or so. But anyway.
My new resolution of the week is to come home in the evening and write for fifteen minutes. One of my problems has been finding time to write -- there's usually not enough time in the morning to write much, and when I come home I'm usually not in the mood to write anything. But that doesn't matter, because once I start writing that usually changes. The trouble is getting myself to start writing. But it's easy to promise yourself fifteen minutes of time before you go off and do something else, and if you wind up spending more time writing, then that's good. ^_^
With that in mind, I went back to my Christmas ghost story last night and started reworking the second scene, which was in dire need of reworking. This was the scene I'd tried to write last year before the Christmas writer's night, and had been completely uninspired and unsure of where to take it... and got stuck, for about nine or ten months. Later I'd come back to the scene and written it with the idea that the social worker who is meeting Captain Rasputin is cold, unfeeling, and unlikeable, but I'd done it in a very heavy-handed way, relying on Rasputin's thoughts and direct statements about Rasputin's feelings to say that he didn't like her, rather than reworking her dialogue to make her seem unlikeable. It was made worse by the fact that I left in a lot of the friendly-seeming dialogue that had been there before, so that Rasputin seemed to be forming a very negative opinion of someone who didn't really seem that bad. Even when I wrote it I knew it didn't work, but I was just struggling to get through the scene so I could go on to the next one.
Anyway I manage to remove most or all of the stuff about what Rasputin thought (he's not the sort to reveal any negative thoughts about someone he's meeting on a professional level anyway) and worked harder at just making the woman herself seems like a not very friendly person. I think I'm going to divide the scene into two scenes anyway, and completely rewrite the second half (the new third scene). There are some other things that I need to establish more clearly in order for the rest of the story to work better.
I read through Wings of an Angel to get more of an insight into Angie. Even though he's a minor character in the story, I was able to add a few throwaway lines in for greater comic effect. Angie is a comic effect character, after all.
My new resolution of the week is to come home in the evening and write for fifteen minutes. One of my problems has been finding time to write -- there's usually not enough time in the morning to write much, and when I come home I'm usually not in the mood to write anything. But that doesn't matter, because once I start writing that usually changes. The trouble is getting myself to start writing. But it's easy to promise yourself fifteen minutes of time before you go off and do something else, and if you wind up spending more time writing, then that's good. ^_^
With that in mind, I went back to my Christmas ghost story last night and started reworking the second scene, which was in dire need of reworking. This was the scene I'd tried to write last year before the Christmas writer's night, and had been completely uninspired and unsure of where to take it... and got stuck, for about nine or ten months. Later I'd come back to the scene and written it with the idea that the social worker who is meeting Captain Rasputin is cold, unfeeling, and unlikeable, but I'd done it in a very heavy-handed way, relying on Rasputin's thoughts and direct statements about Rasputin's feelings to say that he didn't like her, rather than reworking her dialogue to make her seem unlikeable. It was made worse by the fact that I left in a lot of the friendly-seeming dialogue that had been there before, so that Rasputin seemed to be forming a very negative opinion of someone who didn't really seem that bad. Even when I wrote it I knew it didn't work, but I was just struggling to get through the scene so I could go on to the next one.
Anyway I manage to remove most or all of the stuff about what Rasputin thought (he's not the sort to reveal any negative thoughts about someone he's meeting on a professional level anyway) and worked harder at just making the woman herself seems like a not very friendly person. I think I'm going to divide the scene into two scenes anyway, and completely rewrite the second half (the new third scene). There are some other things that I need to establish more clearly in order for the rest of the story to work better.
I read through Wings of an Angel to get more of an insight into Angie. Even though he's a minor character in the story, I was able to add a few throwaway lines in for greater comic effect. Angie is a comic effect character, after all.
