It’s blog, blog, blog! Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Every once in a while, I’ll get some random song stuck in my head and it’s usually something I hadn’t heard in ten years. The other day it was the Log Song from Ren & Stimpy. That said, I’ve been blog-ging like crazy all over the Internet. I’ve started a Project 365 and I’ve been almost consistently been updating my main blog for the past few weeks, as well as incorporating my tweets into it. I’m also working on some stuff with a Star Wars blog. It’s been a blog-crazy month.

A part of me wishes that I had spent a little more time working on my book instead of all these blogs, but I suppose, since the dozen blogs I’ve got make me happy, there’s no sense in complaining. Here’s a complete list of all the other blogs I’ve got going in various places (some updated, some not):

http://blog.doriennesmith.com/ ~ Main Blog
http://p365.doriennesmith.com/ ~ Project 365
http://blogs.starwars.com/kaitco ~ Star Wars Blog
http://kaitco.livejournal.com/ ~ LiveJournal
http://www.tv.com/users/kaitco/profile.php ~ TV.com
http://twitter.com/kaitco ~ Twitter

If I can remember any others, I’ll update. It makes me kind of sad though when I think about the time spent on each of them, but still nothing truly accomplished in the end. Oh well. C’est la vie…

Advertisement

Chapter Three Tuesday, May 11, 2010

My writing style (if I were be so bold as to call it that) keeps me in constant awe.

For one, I don’t write in normal paragraphs; I write with the first line flush with the left margin of the page, with the remaining lines in the paragraph indented. It is almost as if my paragraphs flow opposite what a paragraph should be. Every once in a while, I have to catch myself when I add that same stylized writing to anything viewed by the general public, because lately it is so ingrained in me, that I have to stop and remember what a normal paragraph should look like.

Aside from my hanging paragraphs, I never write in order. I’ll start on one part of a sentence, move onto something that will occur eight to ten lines down, move up a bit, then finish the first sentence before filling in all the other gaps and then reading and re-reading to make sure everything makes sense. It’s wild, but these are “techniques” I somehow developed when writing Flight and continue using years later.

What’s even more interesting (at least for me) is that this is nothing I learned in a class or seminar; this is pure Dorienne.

I mention my obscure writing methods only because it dawned on me that I’m not as far along in my novel as I had thought. Upon my last editing stop, I noticed that I was a good 160 pages out of 224 into the novel, but with the addition of a little detail (a little more description of Damen’s eyes in the very beginning), I ended up reading from the very first sentence and found my true stopping place. Somehow, I’d jumped around so much in the novel, that I honestly thought for a minute that I had full chapters complete and behind me. It shouldn’t really be of any surprise considering I’d written the majority of the novel in this same jumping state, but I did realize I’d made a breakthrough. I was able to write something that had not been written or even thought of for months: Chapter Three.

I’ve finally got two complete and whole (though in Dorienne-style paragraphs) chapters in my novel. Though, I’ve got many, many more pages to re-re-re-edit, I may yet even get this thing complete. And, the best part is, I know much of what is to come is already done for me, since I had been pressing on through Damen as if I were in the homestretch.

Maybe I really am in the homestretch when it comes to my first publishable novel.