Travis Eneix

There’s a great article over at wikiHow - How to Write a Short Story. Some really solid advice and principles there, speaking as a fledgling writer with a few shorts, and two novels, under my belt.

Under the category of gathering inspiration, I would like to add that the tip given by Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird , is still the best one I have heard. I already posted about it here, check it out! Useful to the Nth degree.

Time/Project Management has ever been a weak point of mine. I make stabs at getting better, but is has always been a struggle. Keeping an index card in my back pocket has been a god send lately, but I still yearn for a more complete system.

Today’s LifeHack.org entry had a link to an interesting system, Hacking a GTD Moleskine.

Great article over at the DIYPlanner site about Refueling the Muse. The bits about World of Warcraft playing, and surfing Google for Zombie videos are particularly close to my heart.

In the book Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury has a great essay on the care and feeding of your Muse. Too often, in modern society, we look down on the type of free exploring we do as children. Ray Bradbury recommends this is exactly how we need to operate in order to attract, feed, and care for our Muse. The Muse can only work with what it is given, so allowing ourselves many diverse, and sometime pointless, experiences is an ideal past time if we want to make sure our Muse has fertile soil in which to plant its seeds.

I have come at writing backwards. With the exception of a few poems, and some very intermittent journal entries along the way I made no real stab at being a writer until last year’s NaNoWriMo. In one month I wrote a full blown 52,000 word awful first draft of a fantasy novel - Servants of the Lich King.

Between then, and this years effort for NaNoWriMo, The Undead and the In Love, I managed to write only one short story, and that to second draft status. But, along the way I did manage to read a whole pack of books about writing - How To, Autobiographies of writers, and collections of interviews of writers, plus a bunch of magazine articles. They have all pointed to one thing - I need to write lots, and as a matter of course, to get better. Most writers started with short works and hike their way up. Quite a few make a primary career out of short fiction, and get amazingly good at it. Some go on to write 1,000 page monstrosities. But they all write lots.

This seems like easy logic, but the defining point of common sense has always been that it isn’t. I am learning though, and my journal is becoming my friend. I have taken up the practice of adding a minimum of 300 words a day to whatever project is my primary, and writing additional journal entries as they occur. Additionally, I am adopting the guideline of Natalie Goldberg, in her book, Writing Down the Bones, of filing one notebook per month with whatever writing I can.

It’s a brave new world, and I feel fortunate to be in it.

I just came across this post on what being poor is as linked from the Compact yahoo group -

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003704.html

I have experienced some of these things in my life, but I have neer faced truly crushing poverty.  I am grateful that I never have, and that I have been able to help some others along the way in exchange for those who have helped me.