Man, I love writing. I wrote 1,617 words today, and when I wasn’t writing I was thinking about what I was going to write. I only regret that I waited until about 10:30 pm to start writing; it’s 2:10 am and I still haven’t started my Arabic homework 😛
When I started Hero in Exile, I tried to plan everything out before I started writing. As a result, writing was a real chore, and to make it more of a creative exercise than merely transcribing what I’d already worked out in my head, I played around a lot with the language and writing style. It was still a chore, but I think my writing improved quite a lot. I’ve gotten some really interesting comments back on my writing style for Genesis Earth, some very encouraging comments about the way I played around with the English language.
For this story, Bringing Estella Home, it’s both completely different and more of the same. I’m going into chapter 4 without any planning or preconceptions, so practically all the world building is on the fly. It’s wonderful. This is the chapter where Estella enters the harem and gets assimilated, in a certain way, into Hameji society. It’s basically her discovery of this new world, and it is so much fun creating it as I go along. Lots of room for a creative outlet, and yet at the same time, I’m also playing around with the language aspects of the narrative like I did in Hero in Exile and Genesis Earth. The result, I hope, is good quality creative writing.
Of course, one of the side effects of this process is that it sucks up a ton of my time. A ton of time, and not just time–since I’ve got internet access here, there is no shortage of distractions to tempt and indulge me. This is actually quite a serious problem–and yet, if I forced myself to focus, would I really have been more productive? It’s hard to say, because taking little breaks every once and a while can actually help you think of better ways to phrase things. Still, I know that I worked a lot slower because of all these distractions; perhaps a little more self-discipline would have really helped me out.
When I move out on my own and make my own writing space, it’s going to be in a secluded corner of my house somewhere, with an old desktop computer that has no internet access, just word processors and perhaps an electronic encyclopedia of some kind.
I’m going to have an overstuffed easy chair pulled up to the desk where the computer is, the kind that I can just lay back in and get absorbed by the sheer comfort of it. I’m sitting in a chair kind of like that right now, and it is wonderful.
I’m going to have lots and lots of music on this computer, especially trance music because it helps drown out a lot of outside distractions. This room is going to have a skylight, but it’s also going to have a door with a lock. There will be no phone in this room, and I’ll probably leave my cell phone outside.
There will, however, be a bookshelf on the wall behind me (at least one, perhaps two), filled with all kinds of books, most of them sci fi paperbacks, but also with a few key books on various interesting and miscellaneous subjects, as well as books with quotes about writing.
Sitting prominently on my desk, between a couple of bookends, I’ll have a few copies of my own books in print, just so that I can look at them and think “wow, that’s my name on those books! My very own name! I’m in print!” And, at least for the first few years, it will not get old, no matter how many times I look at them. 🙂
It’s going to be great. In the meantime, I should do my Arabic homework. 😛
