Aye, and there's the rub

[caddyman]

Marvellous how things work out, isn't it? More precisely, it's marvellous how things don't work out.

I have shifted in one easy manoeuvre from lethargy to writer's block. Not this stuff of course, I can write inconsequential LJ entries until the cows come home, and still be tik-takking away through milking time and again when the ladies are on their way back out to ten acre field for a little top up of the cud.

No, it's the proper stuff that's eluding me. It took all afternoon to write a page or so. The best part is, I know what I want to write, I just can't drag out the preferred form of words. I suppose then, that it's not writer's block, but writer's impatience or something (there must be a word or phrase for it). I just can't settle on getting the words down and then going back to the edit; I keep editing and rephrasing as I write, instead, and this means that I get almost nothing written.

I shall, I think, allow that it's just not going to happen tonight. As it's nearly 11.30, I should be having a shave and a shower and getting ready to turn in, anyway. Tonight is after all a school night, and work beckons on the morrow.

Now there's a thing (completely unrelated, this). The line just dropped and then came on again immediately. It was off just long enough to baffle MSN Messenger into closing down - not that I'm actually in the middle of a conversation or anything, you understand, but I like to think that it's me who pulls the plug, not the random vagaries of digital chaos theory. Yes, I realise that qualifies me as rather naïve, thinking I can control something largely programmed by the Hounds of Microsquash^TM, and whose physical architecture is based upon a doodle by an inmate of the IBM Corporation, and then evolved by a couple of generations of web-fingered morlocks in Silicon Valley. Still, one tries, and one hopes against all evidence and good sense, that tappity-tapping on the keyboard and refusing to swear denotes control of some kind.

That said, I have just realised that I am sitting at my keyboard, typing whilst wearing a baseball stylee cap. Maybe the control is in the reverse direction, and subconsciously I am becoming one of those selfsame morlocks... >shudder<. I certainly have the physique for it (that and a craving for pizza). It could be worse, I guess, but as that wave of revelation passes through me, I confess that I am finding it difficult to think how.

Reading this back, I realise that I could have made it two short, snappy and self-contained entries, rather than one long ramble which schmoozes of in a random direction part way through.

I could have done, but where's the fun in that?

Consider this entire entry a late submission for the July Non Sequitur of the Month Award.

I may just win.

Comments

Observation

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

I start very slow indeed. If I edited as I wrote,I would stop completely; For me the key is just to write and not stop, to keep going until something clicks, and get to the end. Then I go back and fill in the details and gaps. Only then do I edit.*

Everyone's method is different. Keeping going, perhaps, is the immediate necessity.

*This is what has got in my way with my manuscript. As yet I have neither filled in details nor edited!

Re: Observation

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Editing after I've written is usually the way I go, too. But yesterday for some reason, I couldn't concentrate on it and just kept going back and fiddling.

Re: Observation

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Smokingboot is correct, in my opinion. You can either just plough on, writing out the gist of your intended purple prose, however basic, dull or asinine you feel it will read later. You could write this in a different font or colour from the rest of your meisterwerk, as a signal to yourself that it needs fleshing out when you come back to it hours/days later. I'd rather write it down before I forget it, than sit mute in front of the PC and awaken tomorrow having forgotten what I was going to write and (more importantly) how it was going to dextrously and succinctly develop an important character or plot point. Are you writing a novel? Then it IS important to keep going. A chemistry text book? Step in front of a bus!

Re: Observation

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

At this stage, it is little more than a page or two from the diary of a character that will end up in a free-form game. While it may seem a little like overkill, we NWO writers pride ourselves on the quality of our background briefs. And they have to be fun to write as well as to read, or really, there's no point.

Hmm... telemeister eh? Two comments ina short time from someone who has just opened a journal... Christian Blues eh? Interesting. Do the initials SMJ mean anything, or am I Watsoning, rather than Holmesing?

Do tell.

busted!

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Bryan, you canny caddyman!
I have just one word for you:
Egnudxyrosplattimolenko.

Re: busted!

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Hello, Mate.

Are you likely to be keeping this journal malarkey up? If so, I'll cheerfully add you to my friends list (Meh, I may as well do so anyway, and you can add me back, if you like). Nice to be back in touch, even if only on a virtual level!

How's auld Californie?

I think that calls for a trichaleanipverolskapus.

busted

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

I think I shall stick around. I did reply to the e-mail you sent via Pastor Lee, but had no response.
I'm still trying to figure out how to take advantage of the features on this interesting site, and have replied to/commented on a couple of other blogs here and there. When I discover how to add you to my list, I'll do so. I love to clack aimlessly on this PC (at work - the one at home is buggered) so I may as well do it so others may benefit from it, if only as a soporific.
Maybe we ought to just supply each other with e-mail addresses.
I love California, the Disaster State, if only because my wife is in it.

Zasplink.

Re: busted

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Yes, I got the email a day or so ago; I was going to sit down and concoct a long ramble by way of a response over the next day or two, but now you've found the blog, you're pretty much up to date (if you have the stamina to read it all).

To add, just click on the 'who is this bloke' link at the top of the page, and on the info page there should be a number of symbols under "caddyman". Just click on the + sign and it will ask you if you want to add me.

dusted

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Done.

Feel free to e-mail, then.

Gellirysonovermeacropaz.

Re: dusted

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Gellirysonovermeacropaz.

Blimey. I thought I had a memory for rubbish, but you have me all beat on that one!