Okay, I'm wearing down quickly. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever end. I can't work full-time and write full-time for the rest of my life. My body may only be able to take it for a few more years. But of course everything is circular. To get more time to work on my writing, to be able to submit things and get things published, I need to not have another full-time job. Yet to be able to get away with not having a full-time job, I need to be making some sort of income from my writing. I'm going to scream - Ahhhhhhhhh!

Now that I got that out, damn I still don't feel better. It's a dreary, miserable day outside, my back hurts, and I am so not looking forward to the winter when I seem to be affected by SADs and get super depressed and have absolutely no energy. I need to move to a warmer climate. Wisconsin sucks! How am I going to encourage myself to keep plugging away, to keep up the writing during winter, when that has always been my most unproductive time of the year? Maybe being in the program at Seton Hill will help, I hope. Maybe I need to have my husband stand over me with a whip and make me work (and no matter what some people would think, no that would not be pleasurable for me, I can't speak for my husband though - hehe).

I think I have to get myself in the habit of writing everyday too, and even at short periods (currently I prefer a nice 2 hour chunk to write). I tend to write in spurts, and write a lot in those spurts, and of course that doesn't get me in a pattern, but then again I sometimes hate patterns. Last thing I want is to feel like my husband, who feels like he's stuck in a rut. See, I contradict myself - I can't do both things at once!

Maybe, in a happy, ideal future, this new job my husband got will be lucrative, and then I can actually stay home and write, and not work another full-time job, maybe only have to work part-time. Ideal future - my bad luck dictates that this will not be so anytime soon, until I've brokem my back and possibly my spirit (but I'll tell you, even though I'm pessimistic, it's damn hard to totally snuff out my spirit - I am a Leo after all). Urk.

Okay, I've babbled enough, and I should probably get back to work. :P Happy writing all!

More than a week, but not too much more. :) I've been sick, so there's my excuse for the day.

Recently, I've had to change my project that I'm working on for school from present tense to past tense - it was more than just encouraged by my mentor. Reluctantly, I submitted, but I know it will be worth the pain.

So, I was just looking at some of my old writing that I have on my website, and low and behold, most of it is in past tense. When the hell did I get addicted to present tense? In an effort to discover when I was "led astray" I went through everything I had on my website. It didn't give me answers - at all. I think it might have been a slow progression into latching onto present tense.

Mostly, whenever I was writing in first person, like with my first really crappy novel, Death of the Dragon, I was writing in present tense. Currently, what's posted for that though, I have the flashback in past tense (the rough draft was all present tense, and the first Entry is the only one that was converted). And I also know a couple things I started in past tense, I then decided to switch to present tense. Maybe my style for writing in first person started to leak over into my third person writing style?

Who knows. No one will ever be able to figure out the workings of my mind, including myself (much to the chagrin of my husband). One thing I learned from looking at my old works - I can write in past tense and it won't kill me. Hell, even though most of my older writing is crap, it still actually sounds good in past tense.

So, I think whenever I start something new, I need to give it a bit more thought on whether it should be past or present tense. Although, no one's going to pull me away from first person present tense - ever. ;)

Woah, it hasn't even be a week and I'm posting again....that's an event to be remembered. :)

Okay, yesterday I finished reading Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was wonderful, as is almost everything she writes. What the book is, is actually a bunch of short stories - but each story is about a different dimensional plane (the stories are connected because travelers in airports can travel to the different planes while they're waiting for connecting flights and such).

The humor is wonderful and it's all written in a very conversational tone. But what actually got me thinking half-way through was - every story is a new world. And she makes each world so vivid in such a short amount of pages. I think this is an excellent book for any writer to read (especially fantasy writers) when they're concerned about world building. Most of the stories just describe the world, the history, and what the inhabitants are like.

It makes me ponder the idea of writing a short story on each new world I create, to give myself an idea of where my story is taking place. I think it would help ground me more and also help with the details and actually feel like I know the world better. Then I can take full advantage of the world. My ideas tend to be strong in character, and world building in most instances is difficult for me. This makes me think I need to take the time to get to know my worlds a bit better, since the world can be a character itself. :)

Okay, no pessimism this time - I really enjoyed the book, and it didn't depress me, but inspired me. Now to find the time to implement my idea....