Productive Saturday
Yeah so it’s a nice day in Sydney today. Cold but clear blue skies for the time being at least.
Had a bit of a sleep-in then Sama and I took Daisy for a walk before a quick breakfast of eggs and toast and then I got to work. It’s like 11.45am now and I’ve done like nearly 90 minutes of work on the novel. That’s really coming along well, actually.
As I’ve probably already mentioned, I’m following Graeme Simsion’s book The Novel Project which is all about planning a novel.
His attitude is very much that ‘pantsing’ – the process of just writing a and seeing where it goes – is more of a romantic artistic ideal than a practical reality for novelists, especially aspiring ones who want to, you know, finish writing a novel and not just be stuck with a drive full of half-baked ideas.
“Creating a compelling story that will make the reader laugh, cry or gasp in surprise at the unexpected twist; setting up and resolving subplots; inventing believable characters and sub-textual themes; describing the world in a way that makes us see it anew; and doing it all in elegant, memorable prose, on the fly, is a pretty impressive trick—a sign of a special talent, if not genius. Trouble is, most of us are not geniuses.” (The Novel Project, 4)
I’ve long been a pantser. The trouble is that I tend to not know what it is I’m writing before I write it. This is freeing in some cases and leads to interesting ideas or fun bits of creativity.
I think the ability to improvise is especially important for an artist – in fact, seeing Wil Anderson’s ‘Wilogical’ show at the Enmore last night was a reminder of this. He builds his shows gradually over the course of festival season starting with long runs at the Adelaide Fringe and then the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. During those runs he might think of new jokes or deliveries and then incorporate them into the next show, cutting and adding but keeping the structure as he goes.
So I haven’t started writing properly yet, the novel, but I now have a solid understanding of the structure and where it’s going. I’ll be working on the characters next beyond the main character who’s my Narcissus proxy, since that’s where the whole thing started.
Anyway, I’ve got to get to work on this other story before people come around this afternoon.
Paranoid
Slightly paranoid today that I’m writing on a work laptop on a Saturday.
Really do need to find an alternative. Just write somewhere else or like remote into my desktop? Would that be just the same thing? Probably. Although just having a teamviewer instance open isn’t such a bad idea to be honest, especially since I’m keeping my PC running most of the time at the moment because of the Bullying Bot on Discord. I might just go and do that…
Look, it’s probably fine. Someone in IT or whatever would have to be looking at activity logs – assuming they’re being kept, I honestly don’t know – and then look at the various sites and things I use, the fact I’ve got Chrome tabs open, precisely which URLs I’m on, the fact I’m on certain documents perhaps, I don’t know.
But still, the assumption is that it would be worth anyone’s time to do that, which I’m not sure at the moment it is given other priorities. Worth considering though.
UPDATE: I’ve remoted into my desktop, lol. So I guess unless there’s a keylogger which, you know, would be fucked, it just looks like I’m hanging out in a Teamviewer instance. Probably not the most secure thing of all time but hey. I guess I could setup a VM? Then remote into that? Seems complicated. Better opsec though.
Current Projects
‘Kaylene’ a short story about a digital artist: 307 words today (2,280 total)
‘Narcissus’ a novel: planning, character development
2022 fiction word count: 14,059