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 A blog about music from my unique perspective (also a spot for some poetry I’ve written) |
Ẃeβ࿚Ẃỉtcĥ  StephBee  "The Bard's Hall Contest"  This blog post will be pretty much my last WdC project this month. I like to push myself to get everything done ASAP so that I have a couple days left at the end to sit back, relax and feel some satisfaction in what I've accomplished. I've developed a habitual sense of urgency so that, where someone else would say “aw, it's only the sixteenth, I've got plenty of time,” I say “ack! It's the sixteenth already—I'm almost out of time!” It gets stuff done. So, a look back at the writing projects I've completed in June:  Five "Reflections" stories for "Musicology Anthology" (One of which was submitted to Max's Tales Shown Not Told, one submitted to Kit's Share Your Faith, one to both Grill a Christian and Quotation Inspiration.) Twenty-eight drabbles for Rachel's Beatles Challenge Four Promptly Poetry entries Ten Bard's Hall blog posts A blog post for the 48 Hour Media Prompt Challenge A story for "Merit Badge Magic" A story for the Veterans Challenge A poem for Cubby's Writing 4 Kids An opening paragraph for Hook of the Book, and A qualifying post for Jody's Contest Challenge.A couple of projects I've mostly decided to skip for now, are Quihadi's spiritual poem and the SciFi story contest. I'm hesitant to write about the Holy Spirit, because I don't really believe in the Trinity, and I'm not sure if different viewpoints are welcome at his contest. And I don't really feel like writing a SciFi about war drones. While working on Reflections, I briefly imagined I could combine the SciFi prompt with "A-OK" and write something socially relevant, because of the US strike in Iran which was dominating the news at the time…  That turned out to be totally beyond me.Speaking of Reflections, I need to add a quick synopsis of what exactly the 14-story overarching narrative is about, and maybe a list of the stories in order of timeline, to add to the folder intro. I didn't attempt to do that at the beginning, because quite honestly I had no idea where the arc would end up or if I would be able to write fourteen connected yet standalone stories about the same set of characters. You should see the Google Doc I've been using for the past three months  I believe in efficiency, plus everything is stored offline on my phone, so I literally wrote every single story into one document, with all manner of (sometimes exasperated) scribblings stuffed in between. I built the settings, timeline, and major life points as I went along. Every story was basically written just once, from start to finish, not including “false starts” where I tested different premises and dropped them. The only one I had to pull out to rework in a separate document was the first one, "Mayday" .The entire process of writing, worldbuilding and note-keeping totaled out at about 45,000 words. Each story is between 1500 and 2500 words, mostly averaging just under 2k. I put in so much effort, it was hard to push each one out of my head after it was done in order to move on to the next one. I must say, this was a fascinating, rewarding and enjoyable project. I've never before attempted to reuse characters or follow them through their lives in a series of stories. I'd been toying with the idea of writing detective stories for a few months, and when the Detective genre was chosen for the April Journey Through Genres, I took it as a sign for setting the theme of the entire collection. Over the course of three months, I've guided my main characters through heartbreak, trauma, a haunted car, nervous breakdowns, false alarms, and life in general. Hopefully they've grown and developed chronologically. It's hard for me to step back and consider it objectively. Right now I'm just giddy that I made it through "Musicology Anthology" in time and was able to combine stories/songs with so many different prompts around WdC.I'm also quite happy with how Annette has set up I Write this year. It's given me the opportunity to have a friendly and helpful review on almost every track on the album, and so much more of my writing besides. I need to thank Webbie and Stephanie for giving us the opportunity to blog without prompts. It's allowed me to share myself with the community in a deeper way, and also given me a chance to set my writing goals in public for an extra boost of focus and encouragement. Listing the goals here also reminded me to check in at the Weekly Goals forum, which turned out to be beneficial as well. Now that I have some spare time, I think I'll go ahead and look into that new OneRepublic collaboration, Starlight. If I like it, which I probably will once I make the leap and actually listen to it, it'll most likely end up as an entry in next year's "The Soundtrack of Your Life" blog. Stay tuned  Words: 830. |
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