Sunday, August 01, 2004

Running on Fumes

What a great weekend. I went on a mini road trip and was far away from the computer and this blog for a full 24 hours or so! Yeah!! Had a great time with friends and it was good to reboot a bit, catch up, grab some new music, and enjoy the company of their very cute little girl!

However, I'm noticing that everything I pick up to read seems to be annoying me for the last couple days, though I ran across some very enjoyable stories on an Internet-based lit mag recently that I will discuss more later. However, I'm wondering if I may be a little bit burnt out on reading right now, or maybe I should switch over to reading some longer works for a while.

I'm still thinking about the story I "finished" writing Friday... well, I'm still puttering around with it, changing a word here, a word there. I slashed at it Friday night too, and it's only 3,000 words, which, for whatever reason, strikes me as the perfect short-story length, so that's good.

Generally, right after I finish a story, man, I'm convinced it's the BEST thing I've ever written, the best thing since sliced bread! Genius, genius, GENIUS! (Though, while I dig this one a lot, I am still not as in love with it as I am the second-to-last short story I wrote recently, I must admit.) It's funny, because then as time progresses generally I do see its failings, shrug it off, realize it's not so brilliant, write a new one, and that's the new favorite.

That relates to what was one of the sage pieces of advice Stephen King gave in On Writing, was that every new story needs to be edited, yeah, but then stowed away somewhere for some period of time so you can look at it with a more objective viewpoint later. It's good advice. Probably something I should do with this one, really. SINCE IT'S THE SECOND BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! Ha, how fickle the creative sentiment.

Maybe the thing to do is to definitely mark my calendar every 6 months to go back through everything again. It would take a lot of discipline. It's so nice to just declare something "done."

I hope everybody had a great weekend, and thanks for reading,

LadyLitBlitzin

1 Comments:

Blogger LadyLitBlitzin said...

That's really interesting. I'm sure we all do that with different artistic forms, whether it's writing or music or visual arts... I'm not sure if I've ever looked at something months later and totally changed its direction though.

LLB

9:47 PM  

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