Tuesday, 18 November 2003

I've nearly finished the story I'd been working on when I stopped all of a sudden to write the zeppelin story. It was mostly done and I knew how it ended. I've got 2800 words, almost 1000 new today. Well, mostly new--I'd already written a draft of the last scene that I kept a bit of.

There's still one scene to write. It's emotionally charged and seems a bit beyond me tonight. It doesn't need to be long, though. I need the hero to show that he'd rather say what he thinks his girlfriend wants to hear than risk a confrontation, and then have her dump him anyway. I figure I can do it in about 200 words and have the story come in at an even 3000.

I like it a lot. I don't know how salable it will be, but it's one of those stories where I like it so much that I don't care if it sells to a major market or not--I just want people to read it and know that I wrote it.

Monday morning it was foggy. I went out for a walk before work and took some pictures over by Kaufman Lake.

A lot of taking good pictures is simply waiting for the light and air to be right, and then not failing to get some pictures taken.

It was a pretty morning.

Steven read my zeppelin story and sent some good comments. I'm looking forward to getting some more for various other people as well.

I decided to let myself think about novel ideas today, after having been suppressing them for some time. But what I found myself thinking of instead of novels was screenplays. The state of Illinois sponsors a screenwriting contest every other year. Two years ago I didn't hear about it until the end of February, just a month before the screenplays had to done. I turned out not to be able to get a screenplay written that quickly. This year I'd have plenty of time. Plus, I just critiqued a screenplay for a Clarion classmate who offered to critique a screenplay of mine--and I liked his critiques at Clarion.

So, I have one story out to the critique group, one nearly done today, and more more (that I'm really excited about) that I want to do a major rewrite of. After that, very possibly the next thing will be another stab at writing a screenplay.

Back at the day job yesterday and today. It's not too bad.