Bad blogger, bad!

Why the Weeble? Why not?

I am a bad blogger. Okay, it's not every count, but I am a bad blogger. My flaunting of #2 and #4 is particularly flagrant and egregious. It's been partly just that I've been busy, yes, but...I admit, it's been mostly laziness. And so, dear reader (how many are left? Three? On a good day?) I am now making ... wait for it ... a goal. We'll get back to that in a moment.

I do not set many goals. Not firm, "I will do X by Y date" goals, anyway. I say, "Hmm. I would like to start running." And I start a running class and I do their assignments and soon I consider myself a runner, as I now do. I don't like setting concrete X-by-Y-date goals, for some reason, even though a lot of people say that's the way to get things done. I have a couple of friends who do that every year, make long lists of things to accomplish that year, and I am not exaggerating when I say NOT ONE OF THOSE GOALS gets met. I hope I would actually meet goals if I set them, but I have this bad example in front of me and I am therefore...disinclined, shall we say?, to set them.

But I am now setting a goal. Monday is blog day. Holy cow. It's official, because I just put it in my calendar! Not Monday morning, because mornings are not my friend, but Monday afternoons. I will keep this blog mainly writing-related, because it unnerves me to have personal things out there on the internet for anyone and his pervy neighbor to see, but there will be the occasional personal tidbit. If it's ever juicy or exciting, well -- let's just say, that means something (anything!) in my life will have changed.

I do have things to write about, I do. I have a terrific critique group that meets every Wednesday, since the end of May, and I could blog some stories about them/writing groups in general (I've been in a few). I could blog about the process of research I'm involved in. I could write some memories I have of writing--specifically, my first (TERRIBLE, AWFUL, HORRIBLE) book that I wrote when I was 14. Actually, thinking about it, I will definitely share that story. It's pretty funny. The book I started when I was 25 and never finished (and never will. It's also bad. Some portions are okay, but my, I did like my "said" adverbs--ie, "she said angrily," "he said briskly" [see all of Harry Potter 5 for a more extended example. No hate here; I love HP and JKR, but she loves her adverbs even more than I did at 25 and apparently her editor couldn't say no at that point], which was jarring to see since they are now a pet peeve.)

I am/we are finished, yes, FINISHED with the Madame Curie script. It has been a great experience, writing with Anil, and we are thinking of new future projects and collaborations. (no news I can report yet on results, though.) One may be a script I initially finished at NYU; I showed it to Anil, and he and I talked it through and discussed some things I could do to make it better/more market-friendly. There are some very good suggestions, some concrete suggestions, but no "just change this word here" suggestions, which are the easy ones to implement. So I have to figure out how, exactly, to make the changes. In the meantime, I have a first draft of another script, started long ago (BEFORE we began Mme Curie) that I'd like to finish so I can look it over and see the many places I went wrong, fix those, then take it to my writing group so they can point out even more places where I went wrong, help me fix them, and then perhaps have Anil look at that one, too, for more ideas.

Meanwhile I continue to write my second book. It's turning into a good thing, I think/hope/dare to dream. It is HARD to write, on many different levels. I had no idea how difficult it would be when I started. I am no longer cruising through with 1000+ words a day, my earlier pace, since I am revising the first half because I had taken a couple of wrong turns earlier. Right now the first half feels like (get ready for an extended simile) a dress I've sewn where I had one pattern established, and I finished only the skirt, and now I have to go pull apart the skirt and take out some sections and replace them with better sections, and I have to get a new pattern for the top so I have to change some other parts of the skirt so they will match the top.

Make sense? I do love my similes.

All right. I also plan to do an experiment. I will announce it soon. Maybe even before next Monday! Wow!