A few Measly Steps a Day #2

Hi,
I went to my all-you-can-eat Indian/Pakistani restaurant. You may remember that I go there when my writing gets stuck, and somehow, magically, the food jump-starts my writing. I think it's that eating takes my mind off of the negative thoughts. Anyway, it worked. I got about three pages of rough draft done. Of course, they're not great writing, but that's what editing is for. I've been editing soon after writing the draft. It seems to work better than writing page after page of rough work and then looking at it and getting disheartened. Now it's time to get my housework done. I did a load of laundry, and I wrote a list of things to do.

Here's hoping.

I'm not a mystery, horror, sci-fi or pulp fiction fan, so I'm late to the party to appreciated the dazzling quantity of work people like Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, Georges Simenon, and Dean Wesley Smith among others crank out. How's it done?

Delightful, you said you are not waiting to finish to revise but cycling back sooner to tighten up your writing. That what DW Smith described in Writing Into the Dark. He does everything he can to let his creative mind just have a fun time writing. Right now he's writing a short story a day! 1500 words minimum. Even still, that's 6 pages double spaced. And he's thinking he'll turn a few into novels.

I'm tiptoeing back into my own writing (rather than hack work) after, oh, 50 years. Tho I'm writing film script style to meet the culture of my script read group, I'm going to "produce" them on the cheap. There's a Stanford/Harvard law professor, Lawrence Lessig, who has refined an amazing presentation style using Powerpoint and typography. Very basic slides, most with fewer than 7 words. I'm adapting that method to dialogues I'm composing.

There are also AI-powered text to voice apps that will table read for me. Putting them all together—there lies the journey.

Well done, delightful! Hemingway drank and went to bullfights(1); you do Indian/Pakistani buffet. Sounds like a better choice. Now I'm wondering, what do I do to get unstuck?

(1)I vaguely associate drinking and bullfights with Hemingway, but I'm not sure there's any truth to it.

A great, free replacement for MS PowerPoint is LibreOffice Impress. It's part of the LibreOffice suite of programs that includes spreadsheet, word processor, database, art-like thingie.

So download the whole darn thing!

Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft

Typing this on my tiny ipad Mini 7 keypad. My fingers are not any smaller, tho.

In Philly. Chiller than expected but likely to warm up starting tomorrow.

I tried the LibreOffice suite. Since my idea of this production is getting simpler by the day, Google Slides will be my first option.

I have met a student actor a couple of times on the university campus. When dry and warm might invite her to sit with me on a bench and record my text. It’s 10 minutes. We could knock off 2 takes in 30 minutes.

This exercise is benefiting me in a way as I did not expect. I am able to put in words reactions from my own current conversations. My feelings about my own beliefs are deepening. I stumble on new takes on some things and adjust my behavior accordingly.

Tomorrow I will start planning a trip to the opposite coast and when I return, I will resume my writing proj CT and scale up my involvement in it.

In Philly. Graduation party for our nephew. Really more for his mom & her friends.

On my own time I read the script for “A Real Pain” and the analysis of its structure on one of the many sites for screenwriters. All fodder for my dream mind.

TCJ ~ What is a project CT?

Google Slides will make it easy to share with others, whereas LibreOffice documents would first have to be uploaded to a Cloud Drive before you can share them.

Eching Revu2, what is proj CT, @Tart Cherry Jam? Makes me think that either you're writing about Connecticut or you're undergoing a CT scan while writing.

Is Barbara's Club now free? I did a search for "barbara sher scanner day book" and followed the best result to Chapter 1, Exercise 1: Create Your Scanner Daybook | Barbara's Club. I expected it to be behind a pay wall, but it's not.

Then I found this on the home page:
And it seems I can keep clicking Next to move forward....

Just curious.

Patty Newbold took over Barbara's threads and now she's passed it on to someone whose name I've forgotten. I've also forgotten how to get into any of the sites. I know "Hanging Out" is still alive. Mostly I know she's offered classes and discussions on Barbara's books. These have not interested me, mainly because she wants money and I am cheap.

In other areas - my writing is lagging. My gardening is lagging. Everything else is lagging. I need to do something to jump start my creativity. Not sure what that is as I write this. Maybe something will come to me by the end of my post.

Meanwhile - good stuff. I have a healthy, happy tomato plant. This is a big deal because I've tried to grow tomatoes many times and failed each time. A possible project in the future - I want to make a coffee table from a slab of walnut burl. I have the burl. My husband made a table top from it and then left it in the sun for four years. Yes, it looks exactly like you're picturing it. I'd like to bring it to life. Making the base will be the big challenge.

I'm not a facebook fan, but I've been watching the reels on it when I'm bored. There's a guy - you can find him on Blacktailstudios on youtube. There's also a scammer with a similar website. Anyway, he makes tables with burl and epoxy that are gorgeous. They sell for about $20,000 - so don't get too excited. He lives in Seattle. Mine wouldn't be anywhere near as professional as his are. For one thing, I don't have the tools or the patience or the knowledge or the experience. And this might be just a pipe dream, but a girl can dream.

I'm reading a book, "The House of Payne." It's not a great book. I'm not particularly recommending it. But it made me think about my life when I was young and in love. I seem to squash a lot of that "in love" stuff these days.

So onward! I think I'm going to go somewhere to write. Maybe my Indian/Pakistani restaurant. And I think I'll draw and write crazy stuff just to get my creativity going.

I think all writers have this vision of themselves sitting down at the computer and wonderful words coming out one after another. Spoiler alert - it doesn't work that way.

I

Returning to home today. Going west the flight is shorter because the earth is rotating towards the plane. Made a list of trip debacles, large & small. From a lost handkerchief to a missed chance to see a particular Broadway show on Broadway and not a touring company. Absented-minded, embarrassing shame. Yucks galore. Publicly moving on and laughing about it, while inside I keep replaying where I missed the cues and goofed and feeling miserable.

Otherwise, what we did do from our list turned out great. 6 egg creams (paid for 2 vanilla, 2 chocolate and we mixed our own black and white tableside in a 3rd cup. Different days, different eateries). Great food. 2 Broadway shows: Operation Mincemeat about the Man Who Never Was that tricked Hitler into moving troops away from the Allied actual landing ground in Italy; and Promise: a look at the guts of a family falling apart while needing to keep up appearances. We also had deep convos with dear friends and our gift of cash has spurred our nephew to go to the main conference in his field to network.

Returned to SEA from PHL on Alaska. Here's what took place:

• "Short Delay" while they cleaned the plane.
• Boarded later than scheduled. Lining: I did make eye contact with a man in first class. I told him he broke the custom of FC folks never making eye contact. Then a woman looked up and make eye contact.
• AC not really working. The plane was full. Lots of chatty, noisy, or crying children.
• We backed away and sat on the tarmac. Pilot announced we had "weather" along our primary flight path and might be rerouted to an more southern path. Oh, the plane didn't have enough fuel for the southern path.
• Sent back to gate. We all had to get off the plane. With our stuff.
• After about 20 minutes, we got back on the same plane. With out stuff.
• The AC seemed to be working. The pilot announced he was negotiating to get back on the northern route and that we were #12 in line.
• 2.5 hours after we were supposed to be airborne, we left PHL.
• Six hours later we landed. Deep into the night. The light rail just took us to Beacon Hill (about 2.5 miles from home). After using our data plan we discovered that stop just before seemed like it had a bus that would take us to within 3/4 miles of home. This worked out.
• No sooner home, than condo building questions began to pile on.

Welcome home, indeed.

Hi, R. An interesting mixture of fun and frustration. Welcome back from your trip.

Me - NaNoWriMo (national novelist writers' month) closed up shop about a year ago due to lack of funds. I met two internet friends on NaNoWriMo and we've stayed in touch via email. One of them suggested doing a "camp Nanowrimo in July where we set a goal for the month. So that's what I'm doing. It did give me the umph I needed to get back to writing. Before this, I was barely hanging in - not able to write more than a sentence or two.

Also, I took the hedge clippers to the mess in my back yard. I made some progress, but not enough. Blackberries!!! Yuck! I used to have a patch of them that covered a third of my yard. I've trimmed them back substantially, but I didn't get rid of every last one of them. So . . . they're ba-a-a-ack.

Good stuff to you all.