Not-Really Writing

For someone who's been doing a lot of writing stuff lately, I haven't gotten much writing done. :/ Anyone else had times when you seem to be always busy but not much concrete product comes of it...?

First, I've got this story I'm working on. It's a fantasy, in a sort-of old Arabic (pre-Islam) setting, so I've been doing research for that. I have a file with notes on the characters and notes on the plot and notes on djinn and magic and How The World Works in this sort of setting (and the husband and I watched a thing on TV last night that talked about old Egyptian magic which I think I'm going to incorporate into this story, or maybe use for another one but I'm going to use it for something 'cause it's cool) but haven't done any actual writing on the story itself yet. Last time I wrote a non-realspace story (that one was SF) I did most of my "planning" in the story itself, sort of, coming up with tech info and history and economics and social structures and such as I wrote. I had to cut most of it out, of course, since it was only a short story and couldn't support that kind of info-dump, and although I saved what I cut, I had to cut over and over and ended up starting the story three or four times. It worked out in the end but it was frustrating at the time so I figured I'd do all the work in a notes file this time rather than doing all my worldbuilding in story form. [wry smile] I'm not seeing that it's all that much less work, but we'll see how it goes. And I still haven't written a word of the actual story, which is for an anthology which closes on 30 September.

Then there's a fiction challenge I signed up for which requires a lot of pre-writing work. It's a remix fest, where you're assigned another fest writer and you choose one of her/his stories to rewrite -- remix -- putting your own spin on it. I've wanted to do one of these for a long time because they look like great fun, both to get to fiddle with someone else's story and to see what someone else will do to one of mine. It's a lot of work, though, and at this point I'm still going through my assigned writer's fiction index, reading through likely stories, pasting links to whatever rings a bell and taking preliminary notes. I have some possibilities but nothing that's really jumped up and waved at me, so I'm going on through the rest of the stories. Other people who've done this before have said that they've ended up starting remixes on several stories before finding one which actually works out past the first thousand words or so, so I'm starting early to give myself time. (Usually I'm a dedicated procrastinator but I have enough functional braincells to realize that might not work here.) The story's due on... 30 September.

Then there's the camping story I was working on earlier. I actually have about 1400 words of this one and it's coming along nicely, but the anthology I have in mind to submit to is open until 30 November so I've back-burnered it while I'm working on the other things. Figures, the one story I was making progress on is the one I have almost 3.5 months to do. [wry smile]

MOME Awards -- this is a sort of peripheral activity but it's still important to me. This is a new award this year and it's gotten a lot of interest and participation within its community. Voting is ongoing through 15 September and there are a lot of stories on the ballot which I haven't read yet, or which I need to at least skim to remind myself of what was which. This is a tighter deadline but at least it's just a matter of reading, which is time-consuming but not something I have to focus on producing like I do with a story. And luckily, as I go down the ballot (which goes from shorter categories to longer ones) I'll run into more and more stories I remember and won't have to reread, which is the only reason I have any hope of getting all the way through. And I do want to because I think this is a great award format and I want to support it. The fact that three of my own stories made the final ballot has nothing at all to do with it. [innocent humming]

At any rate, this is what I actually Have To Do in the next couple of months. Around that is keeping up with reading and such, and paying occasional attention to my husband. I'm just hoping with many sets of virtual fingers crossed that no major kerfuffles or blow-ups occur, because I seriously Do Not have time to get caught up in anything like that. [glares at LJ] But hopefully having it all written out like this will help me stay focused. I should have plenty of time for all this, it's just a matter of organization. Really. :/

Angie