[SGC Week 2] Settling In

It’s a blah kinda day, but really not all that bad. Been playing Triangle Strategy and Stardew Valley. Been keeping up on my words. Been keeping the pets fed. Been going to work. Been hanging with the husband. Been keeping the house somewhat in order. It’s a rather full and varied life, but that works for me.

I think one of the more interesting things I’ve realized is that writing 1k words a day isn’t really that much of a drain. Like, I’m getting it done but I don’t ever feel like I have to spend a whole lot of time in front of the computer doing it, and I’m still able to get other things done. Part of my brain wants to tell me ‘well then obviously you could be writing more’, but truthfully, the fact that I’ve been pretty consistent about getting this done for the past two weeks is awesome. I don’t want to try and do more and then burn myself out, especially since, like I’ve said before, this is the rough part of the book. If I can just make consistent progress for the next month I will be super happy.

The SGC writing class last week was on narrative distance, where were saw where we normally wrote, then tried the opposite. I write close most of the time, and writing far was really weird. I could see a point for it, but I don’t really like it. :p And the Write Ones group critiques were the other two people in the group. Both stories were enjoyable. Though we had one of the critiquees come out of the loving bubble of silence and then start explaining everything we had said we didn’t understand about the story. After about five minutes I took off my headphones because they just kept going and I didn’t want to hear it. The point is that you should find out about it from the story, some things should be questions, but I totally understand that desire to explain everything. I used to do it as well, so I don’t blame them. But I just didn’t want that information so I can continue to not know when I read more of the story.

This morning I still hadn’t put in my next pages for critique. I was feeling way too self-conscious about the roughness of my rough draft. But the group leader convinced me to submit anyway, and so I hope it goes well. The next critique day is on my Birthday so that will be exciting. I will have cake!

Goals: 1k words a day, keeping it up. Be accepting of the critique that will come in on basically the roughest thing I’ve ever let another person read. I know my group wants to help, so there’s no real danger, I just have to convince my lizard brain of that.

[SGC Week 1] First Impressions

So the first week of the SGC is behind me now. First impressions? It’s done what I expected it to do in that I have a group of writers to chat with, but mostly it’s applying just enough of that expectation of accountability for me to get things done. As much as I’d like to say that I can do things without some sort of oversight, I can’t. At least not on a regular basis.

But I have gotten my thousand words a day done, and I am very convinced that I have no idea where the story is going right now, which is not surprising. It’s that part of the book and I knew I was going to have difficulty with it. Right now I just have to convince myself to keep writing because that’s the only way I’m going to figure out what’s going on and get an actual story in the end.

More on the actual SGC, I really enjoyed the way we did the bubble method of receiving critique. In the past it’s always been that the critiquers are supposed to ignore the critiquee, and the critiquee is supposed to pretend not to be there, but that can be really hard to do. When someone says something about your story, you want to defend it. And even if you’re not defending, you feel the need to nod or agree with what people are saying. Since we were on zoom, the critiquee turned off their mic and camera so they could be neither seen nor heard. This means that I (when receiving critique) could respond, and emote and whatever, but they had no idea I was doing so, so they actually had a conversation among themselves, talking about what I had written. It was actually really cool.

And even though I plopped them into the middle(ish) of my story, and they didn’t have the benefit of the first part of the story (There is a story sketch they get that gives them some information, so they didn’t go in blind.) I still got some very good feedback on the scenes I gave them. So now the concern is that many of the newer scenes I’m writing, because I have so little idea what I’m doing, might be worthless for critique. But I keep reminding myself that I signed up for this class mostly just for the accountability. So anything else I get out of it is just bonus.

Now that I’ve spent time writing this, it’s time to get to writing my actual story. Goals are the same as last week, 1k words a day, and doing the two meetings, though this week I don’t have anything of mine being critiqued, so I just want to be a good critiquer.