Mid-third quarter block update

I keep a surrugate blog in a word document, so here it is. It's not fully up to date, but basically, I've just been doing revision scine then. Except, I ain't gonna lie, I watched Doctor Strange Love on Friday. But I wasn't in mental space where I could write anyway; too little sleep of late.

Tuesday, February 6, 2008

I think I know where to take this. I was whining to Anji and Sarah, and as I listened to myself, I decided to go back to my original idea. See, I’m not doing to have a major problem. All my life, all I’ve heard is that there ahs to be a central conflict in a story. Well maybe I do have one. I seem to have written the classic bildungsroman, but that doesn’t mean there has to be some huge, catastrophic event. I’m basically writing about a girl who does what I’ve often thought about doing, someone who has a few less inhibitions than I do, but many similar idea.

So I’m trying to write this girl’s life, basically. I’m trying to give her something of a personality, and say: this is how this person responds to her problems. She runs away and thinks about it, or doesn’t think about it. I don’t know. Just runs away. And it works out, because she decides not to do that anymore. That sounds really, really lame.

Maybe that’s the problem; not that I didn’t come up with a story before I started writing, but that I didn’t come up with a character to be in the story. I just let her form herself around the things that happened, and there was nothing constant in her. So she turned into me, because that was the easy way out.

Or maybe that was my point all along. I’ve tried to take the things I don’t like about myself and put them into this character, because I want people to know that the way I have acted in the past is destructive, and I am trying to change. I’m tying to show people, through this story, what I have learned, in the hopes that they will be able to learn it faster than I did.

I think my biggest problem was that I didn’t know what to do about religion. I think I made the family agnostic. The sort that would go to a Unitarian place if there were one nearby, but there isn’t. Like Allie’s family in that way. I didn’t want to make then go to church every week, because I don’t have that experience. I don’t know how it might have affected interactions between characters.

I’ll probably just write out everything that I’ve figured out, and keeping that in mind, go back and revise the memory sections. Which is what I was originally going to do; now I just feel more prepared to do it, mentally.

Thursday, January 31

Today was kinda sketchy. I’m just not feeling this revision much. Every time I come up with something, it’s not believable enough. I think I’ll end up pulling that “It was all a dream” trick, after all.

Anyway, what I did today was try to salvage what I have so far. I came up with some ideas I think are workable. At least for a few weeks. And I color-coded Juggernaut so I know where to go, looking for specific parts. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it before.

Problem with decathiclam: it’s the same day as states, and girls jump last. There’s no way I can do both. Regionals got moved though; maybe states will get moved too.


Tuesday, January 29
I spent some time looking at my draft, but it’s all so frustrating, I just can’t stand it. I made notifications for people who got into Misentity, and then we had a team meeting for the decathaslam, fleshing out stuff for the team piece


Friday, January 25th

So…Today I was going to try and get back into my project, and I looked at it and went,” wow, this is really, really bad,” and tried to fix it. Nope.

So then I went to the library, and intended to read some random stuff to try and get some ideas/ make myself feel better about myself. I wound up having a conversation with Anji and Sarah that gave us an idea for our team poem, so hopefully we’ll be getting some stuff done on that.