Aug 10 2013

Bad Weather And A Photographic Adventure

Today I set out to try and get some photographs of trains. Well, as luck would have it, CSX didn’t get the memo and nothing moved. Well, shit, time to think of something else to do, so I shifted into fine photography instead. So, my friend and I left the small town we were in and then headed further north into the county in search of landscape photo opportunities.

I was halfway through my work when the clouds, which had been building all morning, started to turn dark and threatening. Ok, fine, the storms that were predicted were coming. I got that, so it was a race to get the work in before the storms hit. I got the last one in 2 minutes before the storms hit in earnest.

Well, once again as luck would have it, I didn’t get a chance to photograph Mineral, Va. It is famous for being the epicenter of the major East Coast earthquake 2-3 years ago that damaged the Washington Monument. Suffice to say, as things were going by then, my friend needed to hit the loo so we had to stop in Louisa, Va. and brave the elements.

That’s when the fun started.

Trying to drive down 522 South during the storm was a dangerous trip. The rain came down so hard that it looked like dense fog and my truck was hydroplaning only running 30mph. What was normally a 20-25 minute drive turned into 45. Several times the road was covered with water and I had to crawl across it. Thankfully, I have a 4×4 truck with an off-road package so I sit high up and things went smoothly. If I didn’t know the area as well as I did, I wouldn’t have gone through the water because that’s how folks get killed. Luckily for where I was, there weren’t any creeks or ditches nearby to cause an issue.

Suffice to say, it was a miserable trip home and I’m very glad to have made it home safe.

Aug 10 2013

A Day In The Life Of A Writer

Today I’ll share the glorious world of a fiction writer. On the days that I don’t have to worry about anything but writing, this is how it goes.

11AM is when I’ll wake up and brew of cup of Starbucks’ Blonde Willow Blend and I sit down to play Scarlet Blade. This will take up a couple hours as I let the cobwebs clear from my wind. After that it’s moving on to a shower. Once finished, I then start to work on writing projects.

As I mentioned before, I finished the first Talia novel and have now moved onto a new project. However, with that said, I learned a valuable lesson. A couple days ago there was a thread going over at the Writing Forums that was enough to make me shake my head. ‘How Many Words Do You Write In A Day.’ Listening to the figures, it was unsurprising to see how merde comes out of a lot of amateur writers. I’ve learned that things are simple:

If you slow down, you stand a better chance of writing good stuff.

Why? Because it gives you an opportunity to sit back and construct your sentences, paragraphs and chapters better. You, as the writer, can pay close attention of every word you put onto paper that way, which will, in turn, cut down on the sheer amount of editing necessary when finished with the rough draft.

I learned this as I ended up hard copy editing this novel two times. After practicing since ’08, this shouldn’t be something I need to do, so I plan to help prevent that by slowing down.

If there is any piece of advice I can give is to do what it takes to make sure you pay attention to every word, sentence, paragraph and chapter.

Sometimes the turtle gets the prize.

Ok, once I’ve written between 1-1.5k words, I call it a day. Yes, there are times that I feel I could go on forever, but is the quality there?

Now it’s dinner time, which is the one meal I really eat each day. If I have 2 it’s normally a weird move…and three is very rare. So, I’ll have anything ranging from pizza to Chinese and then settle down for the evening.

Reality television, outside of Wipeout, has no appeal to me, so I’ll crank up the BBC and see if any good dramas are on. If not, I’ll plug the ear buds into the laptop and watch anime for a couple hours.

I end the day playing Scarlet Blade until bedtime. There you have it, the day in the life of a writer. Glorious isn’t it?