Author: jongraylang

Whew.  It’s over.

Well, the month of November is.  And I made it!  I hit 53,169 words as of 11:55PM on November 30^th.  On top of that, I wrote thirty poems over the month as well.  It was a massive writing extravaganza!

Even better, the fourth book is now at 67,454 words!  But it’s still not done.  I only have a couple more storylines/locations to go.  The completion of that first draft is still elusive but I am so close.  I can literally taste it.

What was my take away from all this?  Umm, I appreciate poetry a hell of a lot more than I used to.  That is one hard writing form with more styles than I was aware of.  I had a lot of fun taking a crack at a bunch of these styles and I feel that I was relatively successful.  I may continue to write more poetry in the future.  It’s an interesting experience to paint a scene, an emotion, a single moment in time and even a good old nursery rhyme.

So, what’s my focus for December?  Get that first draft knocked out.  Get back to editing book three and have it ready for beta readers by early next year.  And finally, make some progress with my writing partner on our collaboration effort.

Hmm… I guess it’s not really over.

Image by Bruno Glätsch from Pixabay

Oy to the vey.

You know when you hit that flow and you can barely keep up with the words as they tumble out of your brain?  Then suddenly (dun, dun, dun) it all comes crashing down?

Because… You don’t know… How… Something works…  (in your best Shatner)

Like, what are the relativistic rotation speeds of a comet and its gravitation?  When was the heyday of the Mongolian Empire?  How does a worm process food out of dirt?  How do you do sleight of hand tricks?  What are the important arteries in the human body for the murdering?  How do cults and terrorist organizations get new followers?  What secret societies still exist and what is their secret?  Is Bigfoot real?

You know what I’m talking about.  I mean, I put it in the title.  The random, odd and weird factoids, science, conjecture and theories you never knew you needed to know… until you do.  The annoying part is, you can’t really move forward in the story until you do have an understanding of whatever you need at that moment.  Hence the oy to the vey.  When I get that flow, the last thing I want is to slam into a brick wall of missing information.

One of the more fun things about research is really the just strangeness of what you need at that moment.  The bad part is when you get stuck in research mode.  You’ll find yourself knee-deep in conspiracy theories as to why Charlemagne was obviously an alien and time traveled with Sigmund Freud for ice cream (I don’t think that’s real).  But, how can someone not show up on a list with the really weird Search lists a writer generates?  And we’re lucky!

To be honest, I don’t know how people did it before the internet.  I think I still know the Dewey Decimal System.  Anyway, having access to all the wondrous and ridiculous human musings at your fingertips is pretty amazing.

Though of late, ridiculous seems to be winning.  I mean Charlemagne couldn’t be that into ice cream.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay