Simple is as simple does

For better or worse, I hit 10k words (SMF) on the novel yesterday. One-eighth of a novel! Unfortunately, I doubt I'll be able to stop at 80k. I sure would like to, but things never seem to work out that way for me, so I'm not even going to speculate how long this one will be. I've been laughably wrong each time I've tried.

Once I'd given myself permission to let the magic flow in the story, it did. I went over all three chapters and fixed the airship portions to suit my new "awareness," and I'm much more satisfied, overall. Something inside me relaxed. The suck monkeys are still dancing back and forth on their legs and banging sticks on the ground, but I've managed to shoo them off into the distance.


Random quote of the day:

"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape."

—Ray Bradbury


He's more fortunate then most, maybe, but I think there's some validity to this, at least for me. My one period of bad writers' block corresponded with a period in my life when I was no longer able to read fiction. I'd reached that stage in my writing development where I was too aware of the wheels of the writer's mind spinning and I could see the construction lines of each story, what decisions the writer made. Not coincidentally, when I was able to let go of all that and enjoy reading fiction again, my writing also came home to me.

I have nothing against game media, TV, movies. I like all of those. But they don't have the complexity and layers of the written (or narrated) word. By their natures, they are a more simplified form of storytelling and they just don't do it for me like . . . true stories.

People say we're heading into a post-literate world. I hope that isn't so because I think it would also mean we're headed towards more simplistic thinking and analysis. God(s) know we don't need any more of that in the world.

ETA: And I was just thinking that with current publishing trends, complex layers may be a thing of the past in books, too. ::sigh::

National Food Bank Week

It's National Food Bank Week, and this is the time of year when food banks all across the country need help. I don't have a national website to refer you to, but if you type food bank and the name of your city or region into Google, you'll get plenty of ideas of where to send food and/or money to help with hunger right here in America.

In L.A. it's:

http://www.lafoodbank.org/

This is one of my tithing organizations and they've been hurting all year because everyone sent money to the Gulf Coast and the Indian Ocean and Afghanistan and other natural disaster areas and forgot about the local organizations. It's wonderful that people donated to those around the world who needed help, but if you have a buck or two to spare or some funky soup in the back of the cupboard or whatnot, there are food banks all across the country in similar need.

Help out if you can, no shame if you can't.